Soundboard Duplication

[Ron Nossaman]

>Are these rebuilders telling their clients that their piano will be 
>redesigned? Or at least some major portions of the piano.

Gee, I don't know. Somebody told me...

Do you, when you put on a new set of hammers from a different source? When 
you put a different formulation of finish on the case or soundboard? When 
you modify the action geometry to make the thing playable? When you install 
a different kind of pinblock than was originally there, or drill it at a 
different angle with a different bit? When you put in a new back action? Do 
you tell them you have redesigned their piano. You have, you know, so why 
don't you say so in so many words? Remember the Steven Wright routine when 
he says someone broke into his apartment and replaced everything with an 
exact duplicate? The only exact duplicate there is is what is already 
there. The piano is presumably being rebuilt to make it "better" in the 
eyes (ears, hands) of the participants. So if the rebuilder and customer 
both insist on making the piano exactly as it was when it was new, the 
customer had better be ready to produce the cash necessary for the 
rebuilder to spend the remainder of his life researching an infinite series 
of ever finer details in search of the perfect duplication. Whatever it 
costs. It will never be done, but the customer and rebuilder will have been 
pursuing what they insisted upon above all else. Fortunately, hardly anyone 
is infinitely anal, except for brief intermittent episodes, and most folks 
are willing to be moderately reasonable and merely make the piano a better 
instrument than it was new. Unless, of course, it's a holy shrine. Then it 
must be made exactly new without changing parts or unnecessarily touching 
it. An interesting problem which seems to be more or less continually under 
discussion here.


>How has it been determined that these design changes result in a "good 
>board"? Trial & error? (I would suppose that to be the case.)

Usually by someone having told them that was the way it should be done. The 
first someone has priority. That's among everyone who's ever built a board, 
not necessarily Andre or Nick. Sometimes by actual experimentation, 
experience, and thought. Either way, it's highly unlikely that you'll get 
any two randomly selected belly men to agree on much of anything about 
soundboard design.


>I guess the bottom line is that I hear so much about duplicating all 
>aspects of the original piano design. But is seems to me that most folks 
>are not actually doing that.
>
>Comments? Thoughts?
>
>Terry Farrell

Yea, if you try to arrive at truth by averaging the opinions of everyone 
who has one, you'll never learn anything that's worth a damn because 
there's a contradiction for every opinion you'll hear, and most of them 
don't fit what you'll observe anyway. So you form your own opinions by the 
power of your own brain cells, and whatever reasonably reliable and 
verifiable information you can accumulate - regardless of what everyone 
else thinks. Then re-think it occasionally to see if it still meets your 
standards. If not, throw it out and go looking for an answer that does. For 
most of the questions you can think of, you'll probably never find a 
complete answer (though you can get plenty of conflicting opinions any time 
you like), so you keep taking what you can from wherever you can get it, 
refining what you've got until the Mother Ship comes and saves you. Be on 
good behavior and don't forget to say hi. That'll be me up ahead of you in 
line.

Ron N