heretical on soundboards

[Ron Nossaman]

Hi all

For a gob of years, everyone and his Aunt Sally was trying to come up with
the magic formula that would make a Montgomery Ward violin sound like a
Stradivarius. Dip as they might, it never worked. Seems that merely shaping
a piece of wood to what looked like the right shape and applying the magic
elixir didn't produce a Strad. A semi-starving and totally obscure
woodworker somewhere discovered the process of tuning violin tops by tapping
and scraping and could pretty reliably turn a $29.95 special into an
exceptional sounding instrument regardless of what finish it ended up with.
The lesson here being that what we see first isn't necessarily what counts
most. As to piano soundboards, didn't the old manufacturers use what they
had for finishing materials? If they had access to a modern lacquer or
varnish would they still have used shellac? Also, I wonder if the percentage
failure rate is any different now than it was then among *decent* quality
instruments. As was said, a piano used to be a more major investment than it
is now. I keep expecting to see the newest wave of ultra shabby imports
displayed at the head of the check-out line at K-mart, next to the breath
mints. If you weed out the categorically disposable stuff, I'd bet the
failure rate per hundred pianos per year of age now is pretty close to what
it was then. The very old stuff we see now (in any category) is what was
good enough to last. The junk was burned for heat long ago. That alone would
explain why you see very old boards in good condition, that's all that's
left, and precious bloody few of them! If EVERY piano over 150 years old was
still around and displaying a viable soundboard, I'd concede the point. That
ain't the case. 

The routine replacement of soundboards is a pretty recent thing. Twenty
years ago it just wasn't done in small shops. In fact, *none* of the
rebuilders I knew of then even seemed to check the crown when rebuilding.
They merely shimmed the cracks, refinished the board (with WHATEVER!!! <G>)
and LOWERED the PLATE to get downbearing on the bridge! Talk about working
in a blind fog, there are still plenty of "techs" doing this sort of thing
today. When these 180 year old pianos were built there weren't any techs,
per se, to service them. The manufacturer had to deal directly with the
owner, who sometimes had the power of life and death over the manufacturer.
"Service call to the Duke, better get moving". Strikes me as good incentive
to turn out the best product you can. Consider, also, that what we think of
as "room temperature" is considerably higher in the cold months than was the
norm over a hundred years ago. They also tended to believe in the benefits
of fresh air, and had poorer weather stripping, which let some of that
humidity back in the building in spite of the coal or wood heat.   

Don't mean to sound argumentative here (HA!), I love a good revolution. Just
a spoon full of perspective, a dash of contention, then stir.


 Ron Nossaman