S&S Sound - 2

[Stephen F Schell]

Dear Norman and List,

I have some thoughts to share regarding Steinway & Sons pianos, and particularly their hammers.

Two years ago I was invited by a technician friend to assist him in prepping new S&S pianos for the dealer which employed him. They had just taken
over the franchise, and he was swamped trying to prepare the large
initial shipment for sale. I was intrigued by the challenge, and
accepted what turned out to be a terrific learning experience.

Some of the pianos sounded "thin, shallow and tinny" as you have well
described. As I discovered, these instruments' hammers had suffered from
heavy applications of lacquer. I worked hard to correct the situation,
deep needling for hours to break up the lacquer and filing to apply the
"Steinway shape" to what were some pretty round, funky looking hammers. They responded to all this work and eventually a BIG, full, singing tone
would emerge. As this happened I came to appreciate that these hammers
do possess some wonderful characteristics. The dealer eventually grew
tired of my desire to spend two or three days prepping each new
Steinway, but I came away with a newfound appreciation of these pianos and their potential.

The Steinway hammers are  indeed soft out of the box, and will sound
muffled and lacking in power until shaping and judicious hardening is done to develop them.
One great advantage they have, though, is the thickness of felt from
strike point to the tip of the molding, especially throughout the
treble: often twice that of most other hammers. Properly developed, this
enables the piano to exhibit a great range of tone color, and a huge
dynamic range. Even on a fff blow, the hammer never collapses completely, and the tone remains full, pure, and undistorted. And LOUD! On soft
playing, there is this beautiful, ethereal sound, sort of a warm halo
around each note.
I have not been able to duplicate these virtues with other hammers I have
used over the years, which includes most of the replacement types
available.

The downside to all this ecstasy is the amount of work required to bring it about. I have been installing these hammers steadily in older
Steinways the past two years, and it still takes me fifteen or twenty
hours of filing, hardening, needling, hardening, fitting, hardening,
needling and so on to wring the most I can from them. And so far, the
limit seems to be with my skills and abilities, not the hammers'
potential.

Norman, I would not like to see Steinway increase the density of their
hammers. The hammers I have been receiving lately have been just great.
My suspicion is that the pianos you have heard have had their hammers seriously compromised by the excessive use of lacquer. I really despise the
sound of lacquer, and feel it generally has a stifling effect on piano
tone in direct proportion to the amount used. Excess lacquering,
especially in the shoulders, results in hammers that feel and sound like
rocks. It is often employed to excess, at the factory and more commonly
elsewhere, as an expedient to "bring up" the tone of these marvelous but
challenging hammers. I prefer, at this point in my education, to use
keytop-in-acetone solutions to harden the hammers; gently,
conservatively, up to the limit of the piano's power, while not crossing
the line over into harshness and distortion. This is lotsa work, but , to
borrow a phrase from an amplifier builder in a hi fi hobbyist magazine
"...yields results entirely unobtainable through lesser means."

To get off the hammer soapbox for a moment, I feel that the quality of
current S&S pianos is very good. The new ones can have some teething
problems, and need quite a bit of prep work, but when has this not been
the case?  The older pianos we service have been settling in and being refined by technicians for decades. We may now be seeing what will someday
be referred to as "golden age" pianos. You are correct that the quality
of these pianos is important to all of our careers, but my
interpretation of that sentiment may be a bit different from yours. I
stay much busier working on pianos with, shall we say, unexplored
potential than I would be if they were all just awesome already.

Thanks, Norman, for raising such an interesting topic.

Steve Schell
stfrsc@juno.com