Hi Jim. Nevin Essex sent me your report as well, below is the comment, brief, I sent to him. To repeat, if you let me know where I may send comments to, I'll be pleased to do so. Thanks for your report and yes, the strings will, definitely, get better with time, you will see. Nevin, Thanks for forwarding Jim Busby's message and I surely would like to comment. Who shall I e-mail my comment to? Please advise. In the meantime, to you, let me say this: It is both simple and complex. I start by making a short list of the tonal features I want from a bass string or a set of bass strings, the list goes like this. Power Transparency Growl Speaking with the same voice as the rest of the instrument. By 'power' I mean I want, pretty much, the full rainbow of frequencies at both pianissimo and ff. I want my strings to be as easily exciteable, efficient, as possible. By 'transparency' I mean the partials need to be as close to their correct mathematical value as possible. This gets a tiny bit complicated. The nodal points are really, as you know, segments of the string's length. The shorter those segments - the closer to the correct value will be the partials. In other words, the partials will be less sharp than if the nodal segments are longer. What this means, the effect of shorter nodals segments will be a greater amplification of the tenor and treble because the bass partials will be activated so much more readily. The steel core to copper ratios come into this as well. From way back when, when I started shipping bass strings, customers called me and said my strings make their pianos sound larger than they really are. I thought, at first, they were buttering me up but the same reports kept coming from different tecs who didn't know one another. Eventually I researched this and the above is what really happens. By 'growl' I mean the cut-off between the sounding part of the bass string cycle and the silence between those cycles. If you were to slow down the cycling to, say 5 c.p.s. you would hear a very short sound, and silence till the next sound. (you wouldn't perceive it as sound cause it's cycling too slow). I want the cut-off to be clean and definite all the way up. The effect is to be perceived as a more integral part of the entire scale, a far nicer, more pleasant blend, presence, with the rest of the scale. 'speaking with the same voice as the rest of the instrument'...well, to me most bass strings you get today don't. I know why this is, it's the core wires, the soft copper and, for a good percentage of bass strings - automatic winders. The core wires, even Roslau, are completely or mostly straightened by the wire drawers taking out 50% of the core wire's spring. I want that spring, as much of it as I can get, it's the spring in the core that provides the power and the shorter nodal segments. I have always ordered my core wire unstraightened, if it should arrive straightened - I send it right back. Fortunately my suppliers know this and it has not happened. The soft copper is no more than dead weight, literally, all soft copper can do is slow down the cycling to the desired pitch. Semi hard copper, by comparison, has some spring, memory, which assists in the amplitude by providing a flywheel effect and thereby gives me a cleaner growl. There is, finally, my winding technique which is proprietary. It contributes a good deal to the tone. In the end you need both. Audomatic winders can deal only with soft copper and cannot employ my winding technique. This is short, I would, if anyone is interested, enlarge on the points above. Ari Isaac Isaac Pianos Custom Made Hammers @ Bass Strings Tel: 416-229-2096 http://www.isaacpiano.com <http://www.isaacpiano.com/> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20090922/34e3dd59/attachment.htm>
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