Fred, Rob, I think you are both making very good points here. An elaboration: I recently was called to get a D ready for a performance. It was a C&A piano, relatively newly delivered, on which the regular technician had spent a very great deal of time making modifications. Among these was to lower the overall damper setup to where no combination of pedal and/or key would give much more than 2mm lift. Needless to say, the pianos had little above mf that was not pretty dramatically affected by this "performance improving" change. No, the trichords had not been trimmed, mores the pity. The only way to "compensate" was to essentially leave alone the glassy, over hard hammers so that they could, so some degree or other "blow by" the dampers. A most mediocre "fix", to be sure, but there was not time to reregulate things. In order to buy a little bit of dynamic range for the poor pianist, I lightly touched up some of the more surface voicing, and opened up the lower end a bit - a poor trick, but all that was available. Having now seen a number of instruments which have had their actions modified in various ways, I would offer two most urgent suggestions: First, consider that any modifications that we do are essentially "point-in-time" types of operations. I have never been massively enamored of the need for a striking hammer to be precisely at thus-and-so an angle. The very first time you shape the hammers again, those relationships change. Act accordingly. Put another way, is the time and effort which you put into a given piece of work going to yield some tangible musical result in excess of the increase of dollars in your pocket? Second, more important in some ways than the first, is that, having decided that a certain instrument will truly benefit from a certain procedure...follow the procedure through. Do not start at some hypothetical step 50 of a 75 step procedure and expect things to work very well, if at all. The instrument described above had lead weights inserted into the moldings of many of the as-yet-unshapen, quite asymetrical hammers...which were hung on shanks and flanges which were most oddly pinned...you get the idea. Very poor. Best. Horace At 01:07 PM 1/8/2001 -0600, you wrote: >Untrimmed trichords (legs hanging below the bottom of the strings at >rest) really exacerbate this, especially if someone has been strip >muting without depressing the pedal: as the felt at string level is >compressed, the felt below tends to expand. When the pedal is depressed >enough to clear all other dampers, trichord felt is still between >strings in the tenor. Careful trichord trimming is an absolute must in a >high-level situation. > >Fred Sturm >University of New Mexico > >edwardsn@rpa.net wrote: > > > > I'd like to add one point I learned from an Eastman Professor here in town: > > The farther away from the strings you can get the dampers when you are wide > > open the more ring you will get out of the piano. It is amazing how > much sound > > they can absorb if they are close to the strings but not touching. > > > > Rob Edwardsen > > Rochester, NY
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