At 20:01 -0700 9/3/08, David Love wrote: >My scale experiments suggest that this scale looks a bit better with >12 or 13 monochords in the bass instead of 10. I'd be curious to >know how many notes on your transition and what the speaking lengths >at the beginning and end were. If I were doing what you're doing I would take the singles up to note 13 or possibly, given the reduction in speaking lengths that your modification entails, to note 14. I don't see any point in having more than 4 notes in the transition. I'm curious to know why you think an improvement can be made to the performance of the O by such a shortening of the bass bridge lengths. Certainly the bass lengths are long for a 5'10" piano and this is achieved partly by rather short tail lengths on the bottom notes, but I've always thought the performance of the bottom notes on the Model O was rather remarkable left just as they are, including the apron, with extraordinary shaking power. You are going to replace this with a straight-down bridge and presumably be using double-covered strings throughout the singles. On this piano I would do neither. If I were going to get rid of the apron I would substitute an angled bridge and I might well still use single-covered singles. I consider the O, for all its faults, a pretty well-balanced piano, with a bass that, with simple changes to the bass strings (as discussed in another thread) has the character I find suitable for this piano. JD
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