<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html>     When I first got the "sharp test blow" religion, maybe 15 years ago, I tried it out on a concert grand. Boy, was I impressed by how far those high treble notes were falling. I was sure that I had always left the piano _way_ unstable. Got done with the tuning and checked it out, and was shocked to find that the top two octaves had drifted considerably sharp, and the unisons I had sweated so much over were gone, too.     More recently, since using an ETD, I have often noted, mostly in the top half octave, that notes will be consistently a couple cents sharp. A few not so terribly hard blows and they come right down to pitch. Then, the day after or a week after or whenever I next see the piano, I find the same phenomenon.     Stability is a very amorphous thing. Of course, it depends a lot on how much friction there is in the capo (or often between string and felt in the agraffe section). I don't think it's possible to leave a piano in such a stable tuning condition that "savagely hard" playing won't have an effect. Not that I don't keep trying. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico Mark Cramer wrote: >snip< <blockquote TYPE=CITE>BTW, after the tendonitis, I used a striker for a while, still with a good blow. Though easier on the body parts, but found the capo sections would tend to drift sharp, and this is a discussion in itself.>snip<Mark Cramer,Brandon University</blockquote> </html>