Arle Lommel wrote:
<snip for brevity>
On a side note, I wonder if curved key stems would help alleviate this
sort of issue. I don't recall who makes them, but I once saw keys that
had curved stems. Basically they were curved along a radius about 7 or
8 mm less than the wheel, so when they were pushed the moved in an arc
rather than in a straight line and the action of the tangents was
therefore geometrically identical for all the melody strings (I seem
to recall it was on a four-chanterelle instrument). I'd hate to try to
build an instrument like that, but it would, in principle, fix any
problems like what you describe.
Chris Eaton has been doing this for a number of years on the auxillary
keyboard of his double keyboard instruments. It works very well, but
is complicated and needs a small spring to give a rapid enough response.
Peter.
