Bass Bridge Position

[ricb at pianostemmer.no]

You raise an interesting fact John. Actually quite a few folks I talk
to rather like the O as is, and indeed Steinways own scaling
priorities are aimed at this kind of tone in smaller grands as I
understand it. It just goes to show that we are again not really
talking about and quantitative improvements. These kinds of redesign
changes are more along the lines of getting the piano to conform to
ones own personal tastes.... which is a fair enough proposition IMHO.


Cheers
RicB

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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