<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV><DIV>On Jul 24, 2006, at 9:42 PM, william ballard wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">'m not clear what you're describing here. Is the "trough" the string groove? I've heard about the " 'blooming' of the felt in response to needling". Cauliflowering, the texture of a hundred mosquito bites. It's a function of hard pressed hammers.</FONT></P> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>When you needle a "hard pressed" hammer (and the Kawai hammers are not particularly hard), the felt expands. You can see the hammer grow as you needle (doesn't happen so much with "rock hard pressed hammers" <G>. With them, you get those mosquito bites, looking like you attacked the hammer with a midget machine gun). As you needle up to, but not into the crown (approaching within 1 to 2 mm of the very apex, generally angling away from the apex as you approach it), this expansion - I call it bloom - leaves a hard "trough" right across the apex. You can see it and you can feel it. There is soft felt fore and aft, and a hard middle. (This does assume a hammer that hasn't been over needled previously). The sound produced with the hammer in this state "lacks clarity and focus." As I wrote earlier, the Yamaha team tells you to pound the hammer against the string to "repack the felt" (muting the string with your finger). The Kawai MPAs, and Don Mannino, tell you to file across the strike point with a super fine paper paddle. <DIV><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>I was a bit skeptical of this when I first was introduced to it, but the bottom line is "What results do you get?" I'm sold. It works. I think it is heat and friction re-felting a bit of the loose felt as much as anything, but the sound is what matters. BTW, they use a very wide paddle, so as to be able to see precisely how level the paddle is while crossing the crown. I should also note that if anyone reading this is imagining the sound of Kawai's from, say, 10 - 20 years ago, and thinking that this "polishing of the surface" leads to that rather brittle, glassy sound, well, the Kawai sound has changed pretty dramatically over the last ten years. I guess I'll leave it at that.<BR><DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>Regards,</DIV><DIV>Fred Sturm</DIV><DIV>University of New Mexico</DIV><DIV><A href="mailto:fssturm@unm.edu">fssturm@unm.edu</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></DIV><BR></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>