Nipples on a bull

[Ron Nossaman]

> After meticulously tuning a dilapidated upright piano in the back of a 
> dark stage at a school, I reached down with my foot and found the 
> sustain pedal was broken off and missing.  

You don't strip mute, right?


>In order to avoid having this 
> the best tuned piano in the landfill (and to get paid), I disconnected 
> the middle pedal and gerryrigged it to act as the sustain pedal and all 
> is well in the tuning world.  Which brings me to my question - does 
> anyone know the history of why there is a useless middle pedal on 
> inexpensive upright pianos?  Is it as the proverbial expression implies 
> "Nipples on a bull"?(Apologies to the ladies)  How did it begin?  Is it 
> just psychological?  Do they do this in Europe?
> 
> Phil Ryan
> Miami Beach

Back when the earth was young, uprights were a touchy thing to 
market. It meant English birdcage action to most folks, and 
they either had had enough of that sort, or really wanted a 
grand. Since they very often couldn't afford a grand, they 
bought a $16 pump organ from Sears & Roebuck and made do. 
This, oddly, didn't sell all that many uprights. What to do? 
Enter *MARKETING*. If you can't sell what it is, sell what you 
have as something else that the customer wants, with 
appropriate markup. Thus is the "Upright Grand" conceived. 
Now, how to make this dog and pony show profitable? If it's a 
"grand" it needs three pedals, right? Some of the upright 
upgrades-to-grand actually included a sostenuto, and some of 
them actually worked. For the most part, they discovered that 
the name *Upright Grand*, and the third pedal, whether or not 
it actually did anything, were enough to allow the buyer to 
fool themselves into believing that they owned a grand, only 
vertical, so it wouldn't hold quite as many pictures and 
potted plants. So what? The price difference made this self 
delusion easier to justify, and the extended family could hang 
on the wall in the stairwell. Serves 'em right anyway for not 
sending a Christmas card last year. All was well in Upright 
Grand sales for many years until someone happened to step on 
that dummy pedal and noticed that it didn't seem to do 
anything. Exposed! To head off the rising discontent of 
consumers and techs asking why there was a dead pedal in the 
piano, manufacturers scrambled to invent a use for this pedal 
- short of having to come up with an expensive sostenuto that 
most folks had no idea how to use anyway. Going through a 
plethora of cheap special effects, they finally settled on 
either staying with the dummy pedal, the bass damper lift, or 
the muffler rail, all of which are cheaper to implement than a 
working sostenuto. These days, it seldom matters anyway, as 
tiny cheap plastic horizontal (though hardly grand) pianos 
with the requisite number of pedals are flooding the market, 
and no one uses the middle pedal anyway.

So there you have it. Uncle Wookie's history of the pedal in 
the middle.

Take it or leave it.
Ron N