"RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht" (ramblininexile) 09/27/2018 at 09:12 • Filed to: shitposting

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MM54 > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 09:33

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A friend of mine is in the process of buying a baby grand, I will have to send this to him

Autophile412 - what's the world got in store? > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 09:46

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Seems like a complicated solution to a simple problem. 

random001 > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 09:54

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This makes me feel funny...

TheRealBicycleBuck > Autophile412 - what's the world got in store? 09/27/2018 at 09:58

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Let’s see, we need a mechanism that will translate 1/2" of motion on a key into a couple of inches of motion at a hammer which will strike a string and let it ring for just the right amount of time unless the operator holds down the key and then it needs to ring until the operator releases the key but will also continue to hold the tone with various level of muting based on which of three foot pedals is pressed all the while being responsive to how hard the operator strikes the key. Don’t forget we need at least 88 of them crammed into a space that is within comfortable reach of a normal adult.

/snark off

Sorry, but it’s an amazing solution to a really complicated problem which was solved back before we had power tools.

For Sweden > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 10:01

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Sustain pedal or gtfac

7:07 > Autophile412 - what's the world got in store? 09/27/2018 at 10:01

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It’s what makes piano action so amazing and nuanced and in a different league compared to a harpsichord or clavich ord. Even the pianoforte doesn't have the same expressive range as the modern piano partly because of the action. So it's great because it's complicated: the opposite of German cars, because it's also durable and reliable

tromoly > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 10:06

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This is cool. I’m curious what, on the part between the key and hammer, the top and right-side vertical piece pivoting contribute to the mechanism.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Autophile412 - what's the world got in store? 09/27/2018 at 10:10

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You’d think so, but it has to do the following:

*Accelerate the hammer late in the press for a quick strike

*Reduce force on the hammer just before it hits but continue to press until impact, more softly

*Drop the hammer away almost instantly afterward

*Relate the quickness of the strike *and duration of impact* to how quickly and firmly the key is pressed

*Receive the hammer return noiselessly for thousands of hits

*Hold sustain if the key remains pressed, mute otherwise

*Related, control harshness of mute based on key release

*Allow external hold of sustain

*Be as close to springless as possible - gravity as much as possible

*Be cheap to make on a piecewise basis

*Be extremely light, so that the operation can cycle very, very fast to allow for quick play

*Be easy to assemble

*Be adjustable for each step of the process - timing of strike, depth of strike, speed of withdraw, depth of retraction, engagement of mute

...and all this with 17th century materials science. It all has to work with brass pins, basswood, leather, strip steel, and felt.

The “simple problem” you refer to is better seen in the workings of a harpsichord. The plectrum rises, plucks the string, and falls away without a return pluck. Since a piano is “pianoforte” - both soft *and* loud - it has to do all the above.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > tromoly 09/27/2018 at 10:17

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The top pivoting bar doohickey hits a stop before the hammer hits so that it doesn’t press the hammer as hard as when the motion starts out, and doesn’t mash the hammer any further than it should go. It’s springed so that it starts to give way before that, so the linkage presses just as long as it needs to to swing the hammer but starts to not press as hard at the last . The right-side pivoty piece pushes the hammer up forcefully until it hits its stop and at that point cams off the thrust surface so that the top pivoting bar can press the hammer home softly.

The whole thing is a marvel of dynamic linkage, because every way that you press the key has a result in the sound of the note, making the piano’s note attack almost as malleable as a traditional stringed instrument.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > For Sweden 09/27/2018 at 10:18

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it’s offscreen and pretty much just pushes up the bar on the left of the gif okay

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 10:33

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The whole escapement system of the piano is extraordinary. And it is all designed so that the hammer strikes the string and then retreats to let the string vibrate. Of course, the other remarkable breakthrough is the ability to play louder or softer depending on how hard you strike the keys. Hence the precursor was called the f ortep iano (loud/soft), while the modern instrument is called the pianoforte, shortened now to piano.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 09/27/2018 at 10:40

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the other remarkable breakthrough is the ability to play louder or softer

Hence my reference to “dynamic linkage”. Due to inertia and the relative masses of the pieces involved vs. the other elements, how fast the key is pressed produces a different effective stiffness of the whole linkage. It’s mechanically similar to a non-newtonian fluid, in a way.

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 10:51

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non-newtonian fluid

Yesterday, my son texted me, “Is something wet if it’s submerged in water?” I replied to him, “ The opposite of wet is dry. If you are in the water, you are not dry.” But your reply seems to make the whole issue much murkier.

Another great innovation to the piano in the 19th century was the adoption of the cast iron frame for the strings. It allowed the strings to be strung at much higher tension, thus making the instrument louder. It also led a music graduate student to a discussion about the cast iron piano. Now that would be an heavy instrument.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 09/27/2018 at 10:56

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For some reason I’m imagining an enameled clawfoot piano, like an old bathtub, with a giant sounding bowl underneath the stringboard , open to the top with a big rolled edge. That needs to exist.

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 10:59

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It’s just a music box, though.

Urambo Tauro > For Sweden 09/27/2018 at 11:09

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LOL I s wear this is how people like to drive.

Pickup_man > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 11:13

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Reading through this list it really is amazing what they managed to do with the technology at the time, but it also made me think of how easy it would be to accomplish the same tasks with modern electronics and software, in fact we could probably do it better and in a sense “tune” how a piano plays based off software programming. I get that the piano is an incredibly traditional instrument , and I love that, but now I’m curious to see how modern technology could be applied to one, or has someone done this already?

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Pickup_man 09/27/2018 at 11:26

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While voice coils, stepper motors, and various kinds of hall effect sensors definitely make an “improved mechanical piano” kind of thing possible, I don’t think there’s been a whole lot of interest. Much easier to mangle needed waveforms in software than to build a 100+ module device that at the end of the day might not be a patch on what already exists. Kind of like mechanical steering linkage.

I would like to see a full-blown Bach-church-in-Erfurt scale automation-improved pipe organ, but the same kind of thing applies. There are some “enhanced” traditional organs, but people don’t tend to go for fish-nor-fowl middle ground.

What if somebody was to add something that actually enhanced it, though? Instead of replacing what works perfectly, say if someone were to introduce a vibrating/transducer-powered head bar to the sound board to increase sustain or enable vibrato?

Pickup_man > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 12:09

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Practicality has never stopped me before haha, but I can understand why no one has really gone this route. The engineer in me though is curious to see what it would be like.

That’s an interesting thought, it’s been years since I’ve touched a piano so I’d want to spend some time playing one again before I’d have a sense of what to add, or how that would change it. On top of your idea, which is actually a good idea, I’m curious now how some guitar like effects such as slides/string bends would work/sound on a piano.

Another random thing that may or may not be a good idea.  With  an electro-mechanical piano you could program it to play the same key/chord but an octave up/down, or a complimentary chord, essentially doing the work of three or more hands, with only two.... 

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Pickup_man 09/27/2018 at 12:47

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You could add a secondary partial mute with its own pedal to achieve an effect like palm-muting, so that the strings are muted when struck instead of muted after. The existing soft-blow pedal only reduces how many hammers strike the strings or how directly. It would also be not very hard to introduce a slide effect at the head - dropping off the hard bridge and onto a tubular profile bridge opposed to it, and movable - except that tuning in banks of identical string length and multiple slides would be required.

Given that the action in a piano is already shiftable, one could probably get a harpsichord-like plucking effect by reengineering the head of the hammer to have a hard plectrum edge, which could also be used for a harder blow sound. Or, multiple hammers with the cam piece (the piece on the right that gets bumped *off* by the stop after starting the hammer moving) deselected by moving the disengagement stop down.

I think player piano tech is a given with that level of monkeyshines, so complementary chords would be easy to implement, just probably not anything anyone would want.

Any kind of pick effects would only be possible to engineer in harpsichord mode, and probably with electric pickups present, which opens a whole other can of worms. Adjustable pickup bar height for effect on pick attack? Multiple pickup selection for different tonal quality? Cross-linked pickups for humbucking or pickups wired in pairs for intentional feedback or *electrically* sympathetic octaving?

Pickup_man > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 13:06

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This thread is  officially at the edge of my musical knowledge and is nearing the zone of being over my head but I understand enough to know that these are all interesting ideas, even if not practical or useful. 

MiniGTI - now with XJ6 > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 13:51

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I’m actually a full time professional pipe organ technician.  Interestingly while piano action is relatively similar between different manufacturers, but the last 100 years or so have seen much reinventing of the wheel for organ actions. Though there are only 2-3 broad categories of mechanisms, almost every builder tried their hand at refining the designs.

tromoly > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/27/2018 at 14:03

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Thanks for the explanation , slowing down the gif after reading that really helped see its movement.

Autophile412 - what's the world got in store? > TheRealBicycleBuck 10/01/2018 at 10:22

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Man, rough crowd around here these days.