On January 5th Yardbird wrote: <<My feeling is that if all the folks who say they never pound a piano were separated into the ones delivering an actual mezzo-blow (maybe 10%) and those with a forte blow (the complementary 90%), and if all the tooners who say that a piano has to have its last ounce of instability beaten out of it were separated into those who actually break keys and strings during a tuning and those who don't (as before, respectively, 10% and 90%), THEN if we got the 90% of all those in either group together for a show and tell of tuning techniques, that we'd find our test blows pretty similar. >> I'd really have to agree that we probably are not as dissimilar as our perceptions of ourselves. I found that I was hitting a piano pretty hard yesterday, but then it was a 90-year old Steinway upright that had somewhat rusty strings trying to move under that 6" thick Capo bar. I still maintain that you can feel a lot in the tuning hammer. If you feel the pin turn and the string move, and the pitch doesn't change - or it doesn't change enough - then you know you must do something else. Otherwise, save your ears, hands, fingers, etc. My principal concern here is the ears. We've discussed ways to pad our hands and treat our fingers, but our ears take a beating from these thunderous blows. Some recommend ear plugs and I have and use them on rare occasion. However, all the ones I have tried block out the wrong frequencies. They wipe out the high ones most. Listening to 4th, 6th and 8th partials is how we do our best work. If anyone knows of ear plugs that are better than what I've found, please let me know. I really want to work another 20 years, consequently I need to be able to hear well for at least that long. Dave Porritt SMU
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