1 string, 2 strings, 3 strings or more

[Ron Nossaman]

>As to your 328 lb., I would say such a tension is dangerous on a No. 22 
>core and would not exceed 307 lbs if I wanted it to last.  

Your suggestion would yield 51% of yield point. Mine was 54% there, where
the original was 61% and still holding after 75 years. Somehow that doesn't
strike me as grounds for reasonable concern, much less dangerous. 


>By and large, the best pianos seem to have been designed along 
>similar lines, with a few notable exceptions.  I would need to hunt for 
>quite a while to come up with more than a couple of scales that would agree 
>with your practice.

Or perhaps the best pianos have been copied along similar lines to keep
from having to design them at all. What I'm doing works pretty well by my ear.


> Without changing 
>any bridges or anything, a perfectly acceptable break can be achieved on 
>any reasonable-sized grand or upright simply through good string scaling, 
>which like all piano things involves a good deal of the intuition of 
>experience besides the "science", much of which is contradictory and 
>devised by acousticians who play the trombone or something.

I disagree. There are plenty of pianos out there that, in my opinion can't
produce a decent, much less perfectly acceptable bass/tenor break with just
string scaling. Too often, the soundboard and bridge configuration just
won't allow it without changing something. They can usually be made less
objectionable with just scaling, sure, but acceptability is what we choose
to settle for, or not to settle for. Must be that cheap trombone.


>  There are, of 
>course, cases where I would love to reshape the long bridge if the job 
>would stand it, but if a piano has lasted 100 years sounding good with a 
>less than perfectly shaped bridge, I reckon it deserves to carry on for 
>another 100 or so without losing its defects of character.  For example, it 
>is the high tension in the tenor of a Blüthner and the unusually thin cores 
>or the monochords that help to make up the "Blüthner sound".
>
>JD

Yes, we clearly do have very different experience. 

Ron N