New Old Bluthner Soundboard

[Stéphane Collin]

Hi Ric.

One more thought, if I may.
Some older pianos I have heard and worked on have after ring sounding like 
pure happyness, emphasizing every nuance in the playing, and some others 
have after ring sound like a mess, asking for being muted, please.
Now, apart from carefully choosing the felt quality for the dampers (I could 
appreciate some original very soft felt arranged in a very clever 
progressive damping pattern) and their shape over the scale (btw are the 
dampers of your Blüthner also flat cut all over ? no V or W shapes ?), I was 
thinking about what could possibly "tune" the after ring.
Backscale length somehow in tune or not, braiding pattern closer or looser 
come to mind, but as you said, in which proportion could this be really 
efficient ?
So I can't help but thinking about the soundboard tuning (flame suit on).  I 
read that Ron O does this after stringing by adding mass to the bridge, if I 
understood well.  But couldn't a belly man fine tune the board before it is 
glued in the rim ?  I mean, I don't think of a F or a F# as lowest proper 
resonance frequency (as was recently suggested, grin), but more achieve a 
certain proportionnality between the proper modes of the board, in the same 
way that violin makers still do.  Localy adjust the panel or the ribs 
stiffness (not only letting the bass move more freely) could bring some of 
the otherwise inharmonic modes of the board into a partially more harmonic 
pattern that I suspect helping the whole thing breathe with more ease.
Ok, the board is not a xylophone, and is first designed to achieve 
structural integrity and provide a surface for air contact, but eventually 
the board will resonate, and all of it's modes will respond in some amount 
to any note or chord input by the strings.  Wouldn't it be beneficial if 
those modes themselves are sympathic to each other ?  And the impedance 
holes problems, if any, wouldn't they be less obvious if all the modes were 
a bit higher, so the "distance" between the modes would be lineary reduced ? 
Couldn't the "one note kills" effect have to do with this ?
Again, just a thought hoping to raise good comments from the list.

Best regards.

Stéphane Collin.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "RicB" <ricb at pianostemmer.no>
To: <pianotech at ptg.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2006 12:04 AM
Subject: New Old Bluthner Soundboard


Hi Stéphane

Interesting point.  Course we will have to see if I achieve more clarity
and sustain first... :)  The dampers are a bit smaller then modern
pianos... but not a whole lot smaller. 68 notes have dampers if I
remember correctly. The bass and the lower half of the long bridge were
braided origionally btw.

I wonder how much an unbraided backscale would compensate for the short
sustain in the treble of such pianos as origionally manufactured.
Perhaps we will never know for sure... but its an interesting train of
thought.  I'll keep this in mind as it gets put back together.

Cheers
RicB