1 string, 2 strings, 3 strings or more

[John Delacour]

At 18:54 19/09/01 -0500, Ron Nossaman wrote:

>I really don't understand this one at all. What is the rationale for the
>reluctance to put a bass tenor break where it belongs by putting more
>strings on the bass bridge? My scaling spreadsheet tells me the natural
>break point for any traditionally scaled piano is nearly never where was
>actually built into the piano. Why is having only 20, or 21, or 22 unisons
>on the bass bridge such a good thing, while having 28, or 30, or 32 is so
>bad when it produces such a much nicer scale? True, it's too late to make
>these changes with a rebuild without adding the transition bridge, but
>what's wrong with doing it right on the drawing board in the first place?

As you will see from my reply to Del, I couldn't agree more.  What I was 
trying to do was to find out what he considered "obsolete scaling" to 
be.  This was not too clear because there were some pretty good scales 
around even in the early 1900s while there are plenty of monstrous scales 
now built into new pianos, just as every grand piano now produced uses an 
older and less well designed version of the Erard action than was available 
off the shelf in 1900 and many makers till recently used an even nastier 
version.  On the one hand there is a huge fund of treasures, some buried, 
some lost, many burned but many accessible, to be found in the works of the 
past and on the other there is a continuance by today's makers of practices 
and designs many of which should have been discarded 100 years ago or more.

JD