Hi Folks. Having gained quite a bit of experience with the lacquer approach to voicing these past couple years thanks to our good friend Eric Schandall, I'd like to pipe in a little here. A couple points right off that others have stated that I'd like to underline agreement with. 1: The mix needs to be pretty thin on the lacquer side. Best to add several times then try to load in a thick solution once. 2: The end concentration of your mix is completely dependent on the amount of solids in your non thinned lacquer to begin with. Its your job (responsibility) to find out what that is and mix appropriately. One has to remember what one is after here... and in a very real sense this applies to hammers that need needling down as well. One is trying to create under the strike point a material that basically gets increasingly hard the deeper one goes in the felt. At the same time one needs the hammer to yield somewhat to the impact of the strings...i.e. it needs some bounce quality no matter how hard it hits the string. A hammer can most definitely be way too hard directly under the crown 5 mm deep and beyond, yet ok closer to the surface. Or it can be too hard at the upper area and not hard enough below. Both cases yield their individual tone results and neither are particularly nice sounding. With hammers that have been pre-juiced all the more reason for being careful with your mix, and how much you use. An appropriately thin mix if used too much will have a tendancy to wash some of the existing lacquer deeper into the felt... making the deeper area even harder... which may not be a good thing. And once its down in there its a nasty job indeed to get rid of. If you are skilled... you can get where you want fairly quickly as Jim B pointed out... three sessions will usually do the trick. I like to sand and mate as I go myself after the first voicing... but whatever. Both as much body (fat sound) and attack dynamics are needed in just the right amounts. Too much body.. or too little is no good no matter how good your attack voicing is. Great body voicing without equally great attack voicing will also yield an unsatisfactory result. One other point. Adding lacquer, like deep shoulder needling most definitely DOES have a significant impact on the sound. The affect is quite a bit more subtle but an appropriate lower shoulder support is necessary for both body and longevity of any voicing regardless of approach. Anyone who does not hear this should spend some time either deep needling hard hammers or heavily juicing only the lower shoulders on as many sets of hammers it takes to start noticing the difference. Too little or too much support limits the dynamic range of the hammers body or fatness. Cheers RicB
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