Electric piano

[Horace Greeley]

Del, et al,

At 08:44 AM 1/5/2001 -0800, you wrote:
>  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.

Hmmm - well, I never was a "qualified" installer, but your experiences with 
the console/wiring problems are parallel to my own.  One did get a chance 
to build one's skills with crimping tools and soldering irons.

>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...)

Which was why so many of these things (and the similar products from 
Wurlitzer and Rhodes) lasted so long once purchased.  Schools simply could 
not equate the maintenance time with the relatively poor performance...to 
say nothing of the additional skill sets required.  With the Wurlitzer and 
Rhodes, at least, no one expected the sound and feel of a piano.

>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).

Interesting.  Having only ever heard the first part of this, I have always 
wondered why that change was made.  I wonder if, had Baldwin stayed with 
their original thinking, would there have been sufficient room in the box 
to allow for better electronics?  Miniaturization was not as well 
developed, and most of the pickups and amps required +/- 12 V.D.C. for 
operation and so, were inherently noisy.  I am not sure that the lab was in 
production long enough for a redesign to use FET transistors, which would 
have helped.

What really caught my eye, though was:

>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.

There was one of these at the Hollywood Bowl for years.  This was before 
the major rebuilding of the Bowl for "acoustics" and "better" 
amplification.  The piano tuned surprisingly well.  One had to get used to 
the different input one got from what little came off the bridges as 
compared to what was amplified, but it actually worked pretty well.  It 
certainly sounded better than the contemporaneous conventionally amplified 
Ds.  I do not remember the name of the head Baldwin technician in LA at the 
time, but do remember that he said that the bridge was fitted with 
individually tuned crystal pickups for each note.  That would fit in with 
my memory of the sound.  In retrospect, I wonder if this period did not 
coincide with the development of the AccuJust hitchpin setup - the reason 
being that, if the technician was right about the crystals, then the 
downbearing across them would have had to have been most carefully set to 
avoid crushing both the crystals and their housings.

Del, in your _copious_ free time....I'd love to get a look at pictures of 
that system.

>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.

This, too, answers some long-standing questions.  Thanks.

>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.

True - at the same time, since most schools seem to have purchased those 
monsters, err, labs, for music major/minor prerequisite instruction and/or 
teaching credential candidates, and are, thus going to have those numbers 
of students in a class anyway - would one rather have such a lab?  Or, a 
room full of 50's/60's vintage Wurlitzer and/or Kimball consoles to try to 
keep in tune?  I am not sure which is more frustrating....except that, as 
one very well known technician once said:  "Tuning a Kimball is like trying 
to nail Jello to a wall" - so, one starts tuning, and, when the big hand 
goes around once, one stops and moves on, without having to worry about 
anything electronic.

Del, thanks very much for a most informative post.

Best.

Horace


*********************************************
Horace Greeley, CNA, MCP, RPT
Systems Analyst/Engineer
Controller's Office, Stanford University
651 Serra St., RM 100
Stanford, CA 94305

Voice:  650.725.9062
Fax:     650.725.8014
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