Steinway M

[Ron Nossaman]

>Where I have determined the tone of a piano to be too bright, (after
>proper string and hammer voicing), and the room too small or 'live' to
>handle the overtones, I have muted duplex scales to bring the darn thing
>under control.  Sometimes it's downright dramatic.  Listen close, make
>your judgement based on musicality and your client's desires.  It's
>another fun variation in our form of 'art'.  Our chief job is to make
>this piano act like a magnet, so your client can't walk by it without
>wanting to play!!
>
>Ya gotta love these things.
>
>Roger C. Hayden, RPT


A whole lot of years ago, I braided off the rear duplex in a new Yamaha
grand. The customer complaint was that the shift didn't lower the volume
enough (It is a "soft" pedal, after all.), so the store owner called me to
try to save the sale.

I had been preceded by a couple of techs who had left the piano in as good
a state of regulation and voicing as anyone could realistically hope for,
but that soft pedal just didn't soften. Reasoning that the rear duplex is
going to make about  the same amount of noise regardless of shift position,
I thought it might be masking what volume difference there might be... so I
taped it off. The customer loved it, so I braided it off permanently. It
lost them some overall sound, but "fixed" the specific problem without
doing anything irreversible. The store owner was so pleased that he didn't
even whine about the bill.

It was somewhere in this period that I began to question whether there is a
truly right way to do ANYTHING.

Ron N