To the list: Yesterday, I was at the home of one of my favorite customers, a retired art professor who spends his days painting. I particularly enjoy visiting with him, as he usually invites me up to his studio when I am done tuning his piano and shares his current work with me, allowing me to free associate what I am seeing in his abstract paintings. I rebuilt his 6' 1" Steinway A 9 years ago. I put in a new block and restrung it, and rebuilt the action with new parts. This was the second rebuild for the piano, as the soundboard had been replaced 25 or 30 years before (but the block had not). It is a rebuild that I was particularly happy with, and he seems to enjoy it very much. One of the notable improvements was in the bass - definitely a better sounding bass than the original, to his delight and mine. This piano is of particular interest to me, as I have the same model Steinway A in my shop right now. So I was looking at the things I felt I had done right on the first piano, with the hope of bringing some of that success to the current project. As I was tuning the piano I was musing as to why the bass sounded so good. If my memory serves me, the strings were GC strings from Canada. They have always been very clean sounding and resonant strings for me, and this piano was no different. So I wondered if there was anything different about the bass string scaling. As it turns out, there are some differences that may account for the improvement in tone. Below are measurements for the A0 string, as calculated in PScale Piano Inner Dia. Outer Dia. Wraptype Inharm. Tension Breaking Percent Waste Length A Waste Length B My original .061 .206 single .279 205.872 21.886% 18 mm. 18 mm. His rescale .053 .220 double .137 233.955 32.946% 12.7 mm. 12.7 mm. Differences -.008 +.014 -.142 + 28.083 +11.060% -5.3 mm. - 5.3 mm It seems apparent that several things have taken place. The string maker decreased the core wire size by .008, increased the wrap by .014 and made it double wrapped, and shortened the waste lengths. Collectively, this resulted in a substantial drop in inharmonicity. This may, in part, account for the increased clarity of the string. The tension went up 28 lbs., which increased the breaking percentage by 11 percent. I believe this is meaningful, as the very low breaking percentage of about 22 percent on the original. The larger wrap with a higher breaking percentage sounds crisper and leaner. The bass sounds big for its size. This may or may not be related, but the sustain all the way to the bottom continues to hang on (unlike most pianos this size, where the sound begins to get choked as you drop further into the last half octave). I wonder out load if this excellent sustain is a result of this scaling change. My feeble memory seems to recall that, some months ago, there was a discussion of bass string scaling. Someone (it may have been Ron Nossaman) made the comment that the core wire size on the particular model Steinway being discussed was too large. Of course, this would seem to speak to the information I am sharing here Those of you on the list who have engaged in bass string rescaling along these lines, I would most appreciate your comments and your observations on the aural benefits derived from such machinations. Thanks in advance, Will Truitt -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090521/2ec3f51d/attachment.htm>
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