Self voicing hammers/work hardening

[William Ballard]

---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment
At 2:42 PM -0500 5/23/05, Barbara Richmond wrote:
>Whatever the truth of the situation is, it made me wonder about the 
>excuse of "work hardening" instead of putting the piano close to the 
>voicing level that is really wanted.  How much "voicing" does work 
>hardening account for?   As I said before, I listened to the changes 
>in a D for 5 1/2 years in a university school of music, the whole 
>time working with the voicing.  Well, I would expect to be 
>constantly working on the voicing of any performance piano, anyway. 
>Would using the excuse (exclusively) of work hardening say more 
>about the tech's ability to handle the voicing and/or what voicing 
>tools (as in whatever methods) they use?

Your comments in regards tuners who side-step the ongoing work of 
voicing with the excuse of work-hardening (if they even know its name 
or meaning) don't need to go much further than that. To think that at 
some point, the work-hardening will be over and done after which 
voicing can be done, free of the interference of work-hardening, is 
the first sign of a tuner's ignorance. Yamaha's assumption that most 
of the compacting of action bearing points and the regulation's 
settling will be done by the time of the Service Bond II, is a 
reasonable one. However hammers played on continuously will only 
continue get harder, even after a once-every-other-year voicing. 
These two situations are comparable, only by the ignorant.

I was told by the owner of a freshly rebuilt Steinway C, that the 
store technician advised the owner that there should be no voicing of 
the piano until all the furniture which the owner intended to put in 
the room was in place. On the first delivery tuning, the voicing 
needed (to say the least), evening. (And I did it.) That uneveness 
was not a function of the amount of upholstery or drapery in the 
room. It was a function of how little time the piano spent on the 
dealer's floor before this owner came in and decided she needed to 
have this piano. (As I reconstruct the time-line, the stringing was 
probably three weeks old when the customer first saw the piano, and 
action work normally follows the stringing.)

Work-hardening is an active part of the voicing, and with hammer felt 
of long fibers and where the heat in the press was minimal, it will 
increase the bounciness of the crown. (I love to hear someone argue 
the work-hardening affects the shoulders.) But the best maturing of 
the piano's voice is one in which the work-hardening at the crown and 
the voicer's relaxing the shoulders and crown by needling are 
simultaneous. A kind of left-foot, right-foot.

It's the voicer's responsibility to make sure that however 
work-hardening can cause the new piano's sound to stray off the mark, 
judicious voicing can put the sound back in the right direction. At 
every single tuning. If there are hammers which harden up fastener 
under use than their neighbors, bringing them back in line is much 
better done, with greater long-term stability of the voicing, in 
small amounts and at every possible occasion.

>There have been a number of times in my life (including when I was a 
>music major), where I played on what seemed like puff balls and was 
>told the piano just needed to be played.

This of course is the other situation in this business, the one where 
NY Steinway hammers were given a vanilla voicing, all warm and 
cuddly. Good piano tone cannot have a soft focus: full power is not 
achieved this way. Not can good piano sound fail to deliver a firm 
attack when emphasis is needed, nor even distortion (what I call 
hitting the ceiling) when anger is called for. But these require a 
minimal stiffness not just in the crown where work-hardening occurs, 
but in the shoulders as well. And this, with the NY Steinway hammer 
can (and should) be done with reinforcing. The second sign of a 
tuner's ignorance.

I'll be interested to hear exactly what you find when you get to see 
this brand new D, Barbrie. I'm betting it's puff balls which nobody 
so far has dared to firm up.

Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, P.T.G.

"Can you check out this middle C?. It "whangs' - (or twangs?)
     Thanks so much, Ginger"
     ...........Service Request
+++++++++++++++++++++
---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/5e/6c/82/d0/attachment.htm

---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment--