voicing schedule

[Fred Sturm]

Greg,
	Good question. Not easy to give a simple answer. I guess I have a sort of 
regular voicing schedule for the concert instruments. Both get at least a 
fairly thorough going over during the summer, and touch up once or twice a 
semester, which usually involves some sticking with needles.
	As for other instruments, well, it's a matter of time available and 
circumstance. Certainly there are priorities. Piano studios are the only 
really high priority among faculty studios (other studios mostly just need 
to be fairly even and easy to play soft). Certain classrooms (where there 
are master classes and the like) and piano major practice rooms are the 
other places I spend the most time voicing.
	Techniques vary with hammers and with location. For high priority pianos, 
I do careful shaping, mating, travelling, aligning, squaring (not in that 
order), and needling, with some judicious doping if needed. For lower 
priority, and especially as maintenance in practice rooms, I do quite a bit 
of steaming.
	Bottom line, I don't have enough time to do nearly enough voicing. I try 
to come close to "top standard" on a few instruments (concert and top dog 
piano faculty), and for the rest to make things livable. A lot of it is 
serendipity: I have the room and piano available for another half hour or 
hour before I have to be somewhere else. What's the best use I can make of 
that time? Often it's some form of voicing. Ten minutes with a 
handkerchief, some water, and a hammer iron can get you a pretty enormous 
improvement in many cases. Throw in a bit of cross stitching and sugaring, 
and it's that much better. Careful prep and needling are best, but there 
the investment is measured in hours. Lasts longer, but there just aren't 
enough hours for me to that on more than 10 - 20% of my inventory on a 
regular basis.
	Hope this helps.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico

--On Monday, March 15, 2004 9:58 PM -0500 Tunapianer@aol.com wrote:

> List,
>
> Although I'm currently only a hard-studyin' Assoc., I migrated over from
> pianotech, because I work in an institutional setting as a "part-time"
> CAUT, and  because 50 to 100-plus messages (a few gems, many frivolous)
> per day on  pianotech became way too much to handle.  Regarding recent
> comments here on the value  of the listserves, these have been beneficial
> to me.
>
> Institutional pianos of course receive very heavy use and abuse.  May I
> survey CAUTs for helpful information about whether you have any kind of a
> regular  voicing schedule, like a regular tuning schedule?  If so, is
> that schedule  tailored for piano location (i.e., studios more often than
> practice  rooms/classrooms)?  And, do you vary the voicing method
> according to piano location, or for  whatever is most time-efficient
> (i.e., file and steam in the practice rooms  because it's quick, etc.)?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Greg Soule
> Pensacola, FL
> _______________________________________________
> caut list info: https://www.moypiano.com/resources/#archives