Light & Lovely Voicing

[Lawrence Becker]

Dear List:

Nevin Essex, one of our colleagues here in Cincinnati, had been flying
around the country doing some high-end regulation/voicing/troubleshooting
on Baldwin Artists' home pianos.  For a voicing solution that he could get
on an airline with, he came up with granulated shellac, which he would mix
with locally-available denatured alcohol once in his destination city.
Shellac is easy to work with, seeming to generate fewer undesirable high
partials and more gutsy volume than pyralin or lacquer.  It seems to me
that piano manufacturers stopped using it not because lacquer sounds better
in the piano hammer, but because lacquer was better as a cabinet finish,
and so that's what was sitting around.
I think it would do an especially good job on the shoulders of bass
hammers, or even under their strikepoint (if hammer softness is the problem.)


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Lawrence Becker, RPT
College-Conservatory of Music
University of Cincinnati
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