[CAUT] Bridge Materials and Design

[Delwin D Fandrich]

I'm still wondering how they propose to bring production from roughly one
per year to 100 per day.

ddf

Delwin D Fandrich
Piano Design & Fabrication
620 South Tower Avenue
Centralia, Washington 98531 USA
del at fandrichpiano.com
ddfandrich at gmail.com
Phone  360.736.7563


-----Original Message-----
From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Don
Mannino
Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2011 9:56 AM
To: Ed Sutton; caut at ptg.org
Subject: [CAUT] Bridge Materials and Design

I like that idea, 6 or 7 pianos to choose from in every home.  Kawai
sometimes builds some really nice forte-pianos and harpsichords to add to
every musician's choices. :-)

I have some experience hearing the heavy duty sales pitch for the
"StoneTone" bridge system.  Every manufacturer has been well informed, I
think, of the wonderful, unique, amazing, magical properties of this
incredible new idea. :-)  Their web site seems to be under revision at the
moment, but their videos and sound samples are revealing in spite of the low
quality recordings.  There is a lot of sustain, for sure.

http://stonetonepiano.com/index.html

Bridge surface hardness has a definite impact on the tone, as does the mass
of course.  How firmly the string is "clamped" to the bridge makes a
difference as well.  So using very hard woods in the treble has been common
to improve sustain and clarity of the high partials.  Using metal to
terminate the strings really does change the tone - I learned this working
on some of the older pianos with metal bridge terminations, especially a
couple of the old Sohmers with agraffes on the bridge.

Changing the string termination material at either end within the scope of
the scale shows the differences.  Our normal agraffes changing to a capo bar
makes a difference in tone, which is partially smoothed over by the change
in the front scale area from high angle with felt in the agraffes, and open
strings on the capo.  The Sohmers stopped the agraffes in the treble
(because the bridge became too crowded there), which was kind of backwards
tonally - there was a clear drop in sustain and added muting of high
partials above the break.  I recapped one of these with boxwood in the
treble, and that helped reduce the break a lot.

I also one time tried putting pins under strings way back when.  The sound
was quite interesting, and I removed them right away.

I'm sure there is a lot more testing of new ideas on bridges that can be
done, but as with most things in pianos it's hard to find something that
hasn't been done before.  I think the granite bridge is a new one, though.
I'd enjoy hearing it on a really nice piano, but wouldn't want to do it to
any piano that was really nice.  If you get my meaning.

Don Mannino