Steinway regulation

[Bill Ballard]

If I may grab on to the tailpipe of a departing discussion, I use only two
measurements in action regulation: a hornbeam 1.75" blow gage and a 0.050"
frontrail punching for aftertouch. (That's of course in the situation where
there are no particular riddles to be solved.) It's similar to the way I
tune (acoustically). The only note on the piano set to specification is A4,
the rest follow from that.

We can talk all day about whether it's the blow or the dip that should be
held steady while the other lands wherever the particular action's strike
balance ratio happens to put it. I decided long ago to keep the blow
steady. I figure that with a constant 1.75" blow, the variance in dips
between a 5.5:1 SBRatio and a 7:1 gets divided by the given SBRatio. With
the dip constant the variance in blows gets multiplied by the SBRatio.

It has also been my experience that that pianists will notice even
aftertouch before they notice even dip. More specifically, if I set a
straight line dip (the same way we set a straight line level), the
aftertouch (which depends on how stright the drilling for the caps was, how
square the knuckles were installed in the shanks, how true the action
flame, how......you get the picture) will be pretty ragged. (The fatter the
aftertouch the less noticeable will be the raggedness.) If on the other
hand, the dip is a result of a uniform aftertouch (ie., 0.050" below the
point of escapement) that raggedness will now be in the dip instead of the
aftertouch. If we may call that raggedness 0.010", that 10 mils is far less
noticeable as 2.5% of a .390" dip than as 20% of a 0.050" aftertouch.

To repeat, The only specs I use on a Steinway are hammerblow and
aftertouch. With these two as bookends, I know how I want to set everything
in between. After all, they each seem to lay on a scale between ineffective
and dangerous.

Horowtiz's Steinway. There may well have been a continental  Horowitz
piano, although in this country we've been used to hearing that he took one
of two NY pianos with him wherever he went (a third D lived chez lui). I
remember the Steinway factory put "The Horowitz Piano" on tour with Franz
Mohr a year after Horowitz passed. It was at Steinert&Sons in Boston in
12/91 (I think) when I saw it. But Horowitz's piano WAS that set of
hammers, and what Steinway had on tour had a new action, case finish, (and
I think a new belly). They were rightly afraid to let the general hoipoloi
sit down at the original Horowitz piano, and try to get a good sound off
those hammers. Horowitz was the only one who could. Rumor had Joe Bisceglie
saying the shank pinning was so loose that the hammers "danced their way up
to the strings". I also seem to remember Franz saying that he had one set
of "take-off" Horowitz hammers&shanks in a box in a closet at home. (In
6/95, when the NH Chapter met with him at Peter Mohr's shop in Manchester
NH.)

Regulating Specs!#$!?  HA! We don' need no steenkin regulating specs.

Bill Ballard RPT
New Hampshire Chapter, P.T.G.

"The truth is inside you, Don Octavio. I cannot help you find that."
The apparition/mother of a delusional patient to his psychiatrist in "Don
Juan DeMarco"