> After meticulously tuning a dilapidated upright piano in the back of a > dark stage at a school, I reached down with my foot and found the > sustain pedal was broken off and missing. You don't strip mute, right? >In order to avoid having this > the best tuned piano in the landfill (and to get paid), I disconnected > the middle pedal and gerryrigged it to act as the sustain pedal and all > is well in the tuning world. Which brings me to my question - does > anyone know the history of why there is a useless middle pedal on > inexpensive upright pianos? Is it as the proverbial expression implies > "Nipples on a bull"?(Apologies to the ladies) How did it begin? Is it > just psychological? Do they do this in Europe? > > Phil Ryan > Miami Beach Back when the earth was young, uprights were a touchy thing to market. It meant English birdcage action to most folks, and they either had had enough of that sort, or really wanted a grand. Since they very often couldn't afford a grand, they bought a $16 pump organ from Sears & Roebuck and made do. This, oddly, didn't sell all that many uprights. What to do? Enter *MARKETING*. If you can't sell what it is, sell what you have as something else that the customer wants, with appropriate markup. Thus is the "Upright Grand" conceived. Now, how to make this dog and pony show profitable? If it's a "grand" it needs three pedals, right? Some of the upright upgrades-to-grand actually included a sostenuto, and some of them actually worked. For the most part, they discovered that the name *Upright Grand*, and the third pedal, whether or not it actually did anything, were enough to allow the buyer to fool themselves into believing that they owned a grand, only vertical, so it wouldn't hold quite as many pictures and potted plants. So what? The price difference made this self delusion easier to justify, and the extended family could hang on the wall in the stairwell. Serves 'em right anyway for not sending a Christmas card last year. All was well in Upright Grand sales for many years until someone happened to step on that dummy pedal and noticed that it didn't seem to do anything. Exposed! To head off the rising discontent of consumers and techs asking why there was a dead pedal in the piano, manufacturers scrambled to invent a use for this pedal - short of having to come up with an expensive sostenuto that most folks had no idea how to use anyway. Going through a plethora of cheap special effects, they finally settled on either staying with the dummy pedal, the bass damper lift, or the muffler rail, all of which are cheaper to implement than a working sostenuto. These days, it seldom matters anyway, as tiny cheap plastic horizontal (though hardly grand) pianos with the requisite number of pedals are flooding the market, and no one uses the middle pedal anyway. So there you have it. Uncle Wookie's history of the pedal in the middle. Take it or leave it. Ron N
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