Electric piano

[Delwin D Fandrich]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Avery Todd" <avery@ev1.net>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: January 04, 2001 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: Electric piano


> Dick,
>
>     If you mean the keyboard lab type, I once had to tune a whole room
> of those things at a university! About 10 or so of them. And that was
> back in the days when I tuned aurally only. That one time, I borrowed
> a friend's machine and it sure made the job a lot easier!!!!!!!!
>
> Avery
-----------------------------------------------------

As did I. In fact, I was a 'qualified installer.' I set up a couple of these
labs in schools. They also were what prompted me to purchase and begin using
an ETD.

A bit of history:

These things were developed at the request of several music schools that
were trying to maximize their teachers' time. They reasoned that it would be
cheaper to buy a bunch of student units (I refuse to call them either pianos
or instruments) that did not, by themselves, make much noise and wire them
all together so that just one teacher could control all them from a single
console. (Just think of the labor-savings...)

In theory, these things could be set up in groups of nine, plus one
teachers' unit. They could be played 'silently' or with sound. They could
each be played individually or all together. If they were all being played
at one time, the teacher could choose to amplify none of them, just one of
them or all of them together. Through head phones the teacher could monitor
each unit individually, any selected group, or all of them simultaneously.
You get the idea.

The original plan was to use a modified spinet or console plate and back
assembly. This, of course, would have enabled them to use a standard action.
Unfortunately, Baldwin hired a woman to head up their music education
department who was quite short and who had long been frustrated by not being
able to see over the top of the piano and see the faces of the darling
little pre-schoolers as she taught. She absolutely insisted that the
instruments be not taller than 30" (76 cm).

This, of course, required the development of a whole new concept. The tuning
pins were put in back because it was expected that there would be a whole
bunch of stuff piled on top of the unit that could not easily be removed for
tuning. The action had originally been developed for a small, transportable
grand that Baldwin R&D had worked on for a time. It was modified -- against
its inventors most strenuous objections -- to fit into this little 30" case.
The bridge/transducer arrangement was borrowed from some other research
Baldwin was doing at the time -- somewhere I have copies of some old
photographs of an SD-6 built with no soundboard. Fairly conventional strings
and bridges, but with just a bunch of amplifiers and speakers in place of
the soundboard. I never did see the piano, but was told it performed quite
well.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the piano lab units. The
action did not translate well to the vertical configuration. Piano tuners
hated them -- with the exception of a few blind tuners that I talked to who
said it wasn't much different for them. The cabling and connectors were
truly bottom line. Most of the problems I encountered were related to the
connectors and the control boxes, which also never did work quite right. At
least I'm not aware of any installations that ever did perform quite like
they were supposed to. I replaced the control box on one eighteen unit (plus
teachers unit) installation I did two or three times before giving up in
frustration. The factory assured the customer (the school) the problem was
simply 'faulty installation' and sent out their own installer. He found the
installation to be quite good and replaced the control box another couple of
times. They then re-wrote the specifications of the control box to coincide
with what the box was actually doing and said that was how it was supposed
to work all along.

I suppose if you accept the concept of one teacher trying to teach piano to
nine, eighteen or twenty-seven students simultaneously, then these things
could be considered a good first prototype to prove the concept. They should
never have been presented as a finished product.

Del