Hi Folks Just got done with a whole day with this instrument. I was asked to get the thing up and running and tuned for one last show before the owners decide what is to be done with it. Some of you may remember that this piano is a small piano forte' with the strings in between the sound board and the action, and the sound board reversed (long side on the right). As it turns out, this piano was the instrument, or one of a couple, in which Norway's National anthem was composed on, and as such the national broadcasting network in Norway wants to do a little segment on this for a show which is to air the day before Norway's Constitution Day, which is the 17th of Mai. A local pianist and I will talk a little bit about the composing of the anthem, and about the piano, and piano history in general. Not a real big thing mind you... about a 5 minute segment all in all. So... the job today... tuning and getting it semi regulated and operable. Lots of fun... but actually the tuning of this thing was not nearly as difficult as I had imagined. I tuned it 200 cents flat, as it hadn't been tuned in at least 40 years, and with the case cracks I didn't want to take any chances at all. It started out at around 500 cents flat... perhaps only 300 in the bass. It took four passes to get it stable at 200 cents under A 440. But it sounded really very very nice. It had perhaps the nicest bass I have heard on any of the piano forte's I've run into so far. The action was in pretty decent shape, though there was a lot of blocking so I had to find and adjust let off. Turned out to be a very small simple screw at the back of the key stick. Its height regulated when the key would engage a secondary lever to the "jack", which pulled said jack off a lip on the key stick. The checks were actually quite brilliant. There was this lever on the key stick that engaged a stop screw as the back of the key rose which rocked the check upwards and toward the hammer tail. Worked great, perhaps better then the modern grand check system really. Lost motion was also adjustable via another small screw on the key stick. In fact, the only two adjustments that were not on the key stick was a jack rest position button, and the damper lift button. The dampers had a lot of disintegrating lead in them, and these had expanded and were hanging on each other badly, so I had to take this outside on some plastic matting file away enough to get the thing working freely. Other wise, the dampers themselves were levered and under the strings counterbalanced by the lead in their levers. Needed new felt. All in all... very workable. After about 8 hours of tuning, cleaning, regulating, and in general figuring out how it worked I had it playing rather nicely. Friday the pianist comes to get aquatinted with the thing, and next Wednesday we shoot the program. More then once today I got to thinking about this guy Henri Herz. Quite the fellow really. Very accomplished pianist / composer... perhaps overly fond of his own compositions, turned part time piano forte maker, responsible for the simplification of the Erard double repetition action that is today's grand piano action. And obviously a fellow with quite an imagination for the inventive side of life. Cheers RicB -- Richard Brekne RPT, N.P.T.F. UiB, Bergen, Norway mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no http://home.broadpark.no/~rbrekne/ricmain.html
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