Pratt-Reed Player Regulation
By Craig Brougher
Larry Toto asked about regulating the Pratt-Reed player. The reason the player either bobbles or blocks the strings is because the pneumatic travel is in some cases less than, and in some cases, more than key travel.
Everything starts with the key, so let's adjust that player first to play well with the key. Forget the player for amoment and make sure that a pianist enjoys the action and the tone of your piano. From there, the player mechanism is able to be adjusted.
In every player mechanism, adjustments were possible. Sometimes though, the player stack was either too high or too low, creating an impossible regulation problem. So the first thing to do is to make sure that each pneumatic on the player stack is able to raise the whippen almost imperceptively but very slightly above the level that a key is able to do it, when the key is _gently_ depressed. In other words, when the key is driven hard, it will raise the whippen the same amount as the pneumatic. When you are lightly depressing the key and pulling up on the pneumatic sriker at the same time, there should be a slight difference in favor of the pneumatic travel.
The factory adjusted each note meticulously, one at a time. If you will simply take the time to do it like they did it, it will turn out just as nicely for you as it did for them.
Craig B.
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(Message sent Tue 23 Jul 1996, 22:53:04 GMT, from time zone GMT.) |
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