Bass Bridge Position

[John Delacour]

At 20:01 -0700 9/3/08, David Love wrote:

>My scale experiments suggest that this scale looks a bit better with 
>12 or 13 monochords in the bass instead of 10.  I'd be curious to 
>know how many notes on your transition and what the speaking lengths 
>at the beginning and end were.

If I were doing what you're doing I would take the singles up to note 
13 or possibly, given the reduction in speaking lengths that your 
modification entails, to note 14.  I don't see any point in having 
more than 4 notes in the transition.

I'm curious to know why you think an improvement can be made to the 
performance of the O by such a shortening of the bass bridge lengths. 
Certainly the bass lengths are long for a 5'10" piano and this is 
achieved partly by rather short tail lengths on the bottom notes, but 
I've always thought the performance of the bottom notes on the Model 
O was rather remarkable left just as they are, including the apron, 
with extraordinary shaking power.  You are going to replace this with 
a straight-down bridge and presumably be using double-covered strings 
throughout the singles.  On this piano I would do neither.  If I were 
going to get rid of the apron I would substitute an angled bridge and 
I might well still use single-covered singles.

I consider the O, for all its faults, a pretty well-balanced piano, 
with a bass that, with simple changes to the bass strings (as 
discussed in another thread) has the character I find suitable for 
this piano.

JD