There are practical reasons to stop at 3 strings per tenor/treble unison. When you look at the obvious exceptionthe Blüthneryoull see the action center spacing start to get some wide. Carry this through the whole tenor and, because the action stack has to be made wider, the key flare also has to increase. This, of course, increases the friction drag on the center rail bushings causing them to wear out even faster than they do now. As well, hammers would have to be made wider which would further increase their already excessive mass. Then hammershanks need to be made stiffer; ditto wippens. And then there are the keys which, in addition to their increased flare would also have to be made stiffer to handle the additional mass of the action. And on and on and on . Not to mention that the timbral transition is difficult enough between the wrapped strings and the tri-chord plain steel strings as it is. I cant see how that would be improved any using four-string unisons. Im sticking to what Ive been saying for some time now: There is little wrong with modern music that a good, long-term power outage doesnt solve. Even though the lack of electricity may not do anything to improve the actual quality of the stuff at least were not forced to unwillingly listen to it three blocks away. ddf Delwin D Fandrich Piano Design & Fabrication 620 South Tower Avenue Centralia, Washington 98531 USA fandrich at pianobuilders.com Phone 360.736.7563 -----Original Message----- From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of David Nereson Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 5:16 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: [pianotech] somewhat OT Re: sounds, noise, our loud world If the population had never grown and concert halls had never gotten larger, pianos may have remained 2-string unison instruments with no cast iron plate. The plate was developed to hold the higher tension of 3-string unison instruments that had to project to the back of larger concert halls and had to be louder to be heard over larger symphony orchestras. Later it became necessary to mike even pianos, but only because most of the other instruments were amplified. I wonder if amplifiers hadn't been invented, if they would have started stringing them with 4 or 5 unison strings and even heavier plates? --David Nereson, RPT -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091217/7c1638b7/attachment-0001.htm>
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