Thank you for this, John. I'm curious as to how you whip both ends of a bass string. I can think of two possibilities: 1. The whipping goes on the outside at the finish end. If so, I imagine there must be something you need to do to keep it from rattling or buzzing. 2. You whip the finish end with a separate piece of copper wire before winding the string, and then just wind over it when you get there. Or do you do something else? Thanks, Bert --- On Sat, 9/11/10, John Delacour <JD at Pianomaker.co.uk> wrote: ... The technique is called "whipping" or "whipping in" and has been used in France and Germany since the year dot. Erard bass strings were whipped at both ends throughout the scale. Blüthner on many models whipped the thinnest 5 or 6 pairs both ends and then went plain. Bechstein, and many other makers, whip all bichords at the bottom end only. Steinway, till at least the 1970s, whipped all the bichords, flattening the copper first and close-whipping under the cover at the bottom end. The reason they stopped was simply because they couldn't be bothered any more, So far as I can tell there is no special virtue in the Steinway style of whipping, though I will do it for certain jobs that need to be very authentic-looking. It takes more time and effort, whereas regular Erard-style whipping is just as quick as leaving the ends plain. I generally whip all bichords on well-scaled grands. For shorter pianos I will whip down to copper size 16 or so and leave the last 4 or 5 bichords plain. I also have special techniques for loading the ends on the singles but generally do this only on larger grands. I will whip both ends down to copper size 6 or 7 copper (0.45mm) and in this case the purpose is to prevent unravelling. After that I whip only the bottom ends. Erard is the only maker that ever whipped the top ends all through and there is probably no virtue in this at all, otherwise other makers in search of excellence would have imitated them. The fact is, surprising to say, that in the early 1800s they had not yet discovered the trick of swaging the steel to hold the copper at each end and instead filed the wire to roughen it. This filing will hold the thinner covers well enough but not the heavier stuff. Whipping was Erard's solution to the problem. Broadwood soldered the ends! Even after swaging became universal, makers continued to whip the bottom ends for tonal reasons. I have never made a comparison using oscilloscopes etc. between plain-ended and whipped covered strings but go simply by the evidence of my ears, and my impression is shared by many, some of whom may even have used an oscilloscope. I'd sum it up by saying that whipping "clarifies" the tone, discouraging stray harmonics and favouring the fundamental. It also gives a cleaner attack and a better decay curve. I have discovered that the loading of the singles, which nobody else does nowadays and very few did in the past, brings the same advantages but I generally limit this to the longer grands. No English maker ever whipped the bass strings so far as I know. I enclose two pictures from my own factory showing first Erard (common) whipping and second Steinway whipping JD (Bass string maker) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100914/1a0e1d7b/attachment-0001.htm>
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