Dear Cynical Smartypantses,
I've been puttering around with a 106 year old
Everett upright, in preparation for the TCM festival;
and marveling at how an unrestored piano such as this
can still sound so wonderful: with a rich, warm, clean
and well-defined tone!
And then I noticed that every bit of the case
( under the veneer, that is ) seems to be solid ash,
excepting the keybed, which is laminated rock maple
similar in configuration to the glued-up boards used
in bowling alleys.
And then I remembered the new, Georgia-built
Yamaha upright I tuned at a church last year: with its
particle board case and exceptionally muddy, "thubby"
tone.....
What better explanation could there possibly be
for this contrast than that hard woods transmit
runaway vibrations back to the board for further
expression as audible sound, AKA the much-maligned
"Circle of Sound" ?
While we may consider many of those in the
marketing end of the piano business worthy of a good
spanking, are we perhaps guilty of letting our disdain
of them denigrate a valid concept ?
Thump
--- Ron Nossaman <rnossaman@cox.net> wrote:
>
> >It has been tuned by two other RPT's recently. I
> tuned it yesterday and
> >am going back
> >to Charleston ( that's where the piano is-50 miles
> up the road) next
> >week to see
> > how MY tuning fared. It was mostly unisons, the
> worst in the A-49 thru
> >C-64 range.
>
> Killer octave country. I'd check crown for sure
> there.
>
>
> >One other thing I didn't mention in my first post
> is that I found a
> >plate lag bolt,
> >the one in the extreme right front that was not
> snugged down to the
> >point that the flat washer
> >and the lock washer both would spin.
>
> Did the rebuilder mount the plate with the old lags
> (on dowels?) instead of
> the bolt suspension system designed for this plate?
>
>
> >Should this project proceed, and while the board is
> out, do you see any
> >benefit in modifying
> >or adding to the bracing etc. Re-inventing the
> wheel so to speak.
>
> If it was my project, I'd want to add bracing,
> cutoff and fish, new rib
> scale, soundboard, bridges, string scale with no
> wrapped trichords, and do
> something about that front duplex.
>
>
> >I've
> >already told the church
> >that regardless of what else is going on they have
> a climate control
> >problem they will have to address.
>
> Good! I didn't realize this was a church from your
> first post.
>
> Ron N
>
> _______________________________________________
> pianotech list info:
> https://www.moypiano.com/resources/#archives
>
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