Piano Design Question

[Overs Pianos]

At 6:02 AM -0400 16/7/05, Farrell wrote:
>
>Thanks for all the responses. Either maybe I'm not so crazy after 
>all, or several others are just a kookey as me! This all makes for 
>good night time cranial processing.....
>
>Terry Farrell

When someone throws an idea into the ring, there's no telling where 
it might lead - thankfully - however . . .

There is one factor which might be an advantage with the overstrung 
layout. It allows for longer speaking lengths in the low tenor, 
provided that the bass bridge is positioned far enough away from the 
straight side to allow room for the longer tenor scale and its 
accompanying hitch pin belt. Some will argue that you can have a long 
scale on the plain wire string section of a straight or oblique 
layout provided the case is a wide bellied design, but I've not been 
particularly impressed with a number of the wide bellied cases I've 
heard in recent years. I realise that the examples I'm thinking of 
are overstrung, but I think the same lack of tonal focus would plague 
the straight strung layout if one were to use a wide belly.

The wide bellied fashion is really raging in piano-design land at the 
moment. But its a fashion I have no intention of taking up.

Since there should be a shortening of the speaking length from the 
last plain-strung note to the first covered wire, if this break is 
also positioned at the break between the tenor and bass in an 
overstrung design, it will yield a good transition and a 
lowest-possible minimum inharmonicity for a given length of piano. 
Now I realise that some will argue that we don't want the lowest 
possible inharmonicity at the crossover. That's OK if that's what one 
wants, but my preference is for a low inharmonicity scale, and the 
overstrung layout would seem to allow for this to be taken further 
than with straight or oblique stringing.

I admit that the overstrung layout also makes a good tonal blend 
across the break more difficult to achieve, but that doesn't matter 
provided you are aware of the potential for disaster and position the 
bridges to achieve a similar stiffness for both bridges at the 
crossover point. It can be done, though we do see some rather 
ordinary examples in contemporary and not-so-contemporary designs 
from time to time.

Ron O.

-- 
OVERS PIANOS - SYDNEY
    Grand Piano Manufacturers
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Web http://overspianos.com.au
mailto:ron@overspianos.com.au
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