RE>Tips from a pianist! 4/8/96 Dear Anton, I am so pleased that you are 'on line' and do not unsubscribe before this message reaches you, as I have some suggestions which may be of significant use to you. Your points are well taken, especially concerning sharps which 'bury', to use the accepted terminology. This usually occurs if the sharps height has been set first, (too low) and the front rail paper punchings subtracted in order to produce aftertouch. It is our practice to set the height at the front first as you rightly suggest, and then raise the keys at the balance rail until the height produces correct aftertouch. A quick approximate check for the height above the naturals with the keys at rest is to look at the small flats at the bottom of the sloping fronts of ths sharps. About one half should be visible. Using a dime or penny to check the depressed height is very handy of course , but i will send a simple gauge to you which is a little easier to use. If it gets lost I would be happy to send another. Regarding testing for open strings a new idea has come along which is so simple, obvious and superior that many of us are kicking ourselves for not having thought of it years ago. One simply lays a strip of felt or cloth between the repetition levers and knuckles . This eliminates the let-off and causes the hammer to block the strings. Then the key is used to hold the hammer against the strings. As the damper is also lifted at the same time, the use of the pedal is redundant. In addition to the gauge I will include a suitable piece of cloth for this purpose. The idea was demonstrated last Summer at a convention in Alberqurque. The instructor was from Kawai. I hope you will find this helpful. All the very best to you and yours, With warmest regards, Ted. -------------------------------------- Date: 4/2/96 0:56 To: Ted Sambell From: pianotech I subscribed to this list a few weeks ago, am impressed by the way you are helping each other. I am sure that this type of interchange will be very helpful for many of you. However, I am going to unsubscribe at the end of this week, for the volume of mail is prohibitive, especially as when I go on tour (I am a concert pianist, for those of you who may not know my name) I am often away for weeks at a time, and at the rate of about 12 messages a day it would be hopeless to ever catch up. However, I may subscribe again, and I will stay on now long enough to read any responses that come in. Although as a temporary visitor among you I have no right to criticize, it seems to me that there are a lot of superfluous messages and many are too long; I for one detest seeing the original mail reproduced a second time and sometimes more often in a response. As a pianist who has taken a serious interest in regulation and voicing, and who considers himself - rightly or wrongly - to be almost unique as a pianist capable of voicing and regulating at the highest standards (among many others, Arrau, Rudolf Serkin, Richard Goode, and Claude Frank have performed on my personal piano, voiced and regulated by me) I have a few pet peeves that I would like to share with you, errors in piano care that I find repeatedly on my tours. Almost half of the instruments I see have black keys that go too deep. This creates a serious problem, for we must hit the keys very hard much of the time. If there is not enough space between the top of the white keys in resting position and the top of the black keys when depressed, a solid whack on a black key is likely to set the adjoining white key in motion. Even if it does not move down far enough and fast enough to cause a wrong note, it feels precarious and threatening. A good test is to put a dime (preferably US, as they are thicker) or even better a penny on the white key just in front of the sharp, and pressing the sharp down firmly but not heavily, slide another coin or flat object along the top of the sharp. It must have enough space to slide over the coin on the white key. If it pushes the the coin away, the sharps are going too low. To correct this one can add front rail punchings on all the notes, but this will reduce the depth of touch, and perhaps leave insufficient after-touch. In most cases, it will be necessary to remove the stack and put punchings under the black keys at the center rail, and then place punchings on the front rail. I have found that if you are consistent in the thickness of punchings, it will not be necessary to level the keys after this - in any case, one does not see or feel miniscule irregularities of position on the sharps as you would on the white keys. Another shortcoming I see all too frequently is keys which are too tight at the balance rail. I can assure you that this makes a huge difference in fluency, speed, repetition etc. When you lift a key from its normal resting place, it should fall back into position promptly. If it remains elevated above key level it is too tight. I find that in less than an hour one can remove the keys and just gently twist a smooth round tool (the straight end of a capstan driver, for example) to expand the hole in the bottom of the key minutely - never of course abraising it or heaven forbid actually removing any wood. The tightness is at the very bottom of the hole. Lubricating the pins can help too, but is usually not sufficient by itself. Speaking of which, the front rail pins are something which are often neglected; lubricating these occasionally is very important, and crucial for glissandos. Press some keys firmly to the right or left while depressing them. They should glide smoothly and easily despite the lateral pressure. After complaining about the length of mail, I see I am being very guilty myself in this respect, and there will be no time to list many of my other pet peeves. So I will leave you with just three more very briefly: 1) Very rarely do I find a piano on which the hammers have been properly fitted to the strings. Hardly anything is as important as this for a beautiful, even sonority; it is even more important than voicing even, and should be done before voicing, and if possible checked again after, as needling or filing can throw it off once more. Recently I worked on a piano which was dreadfully uneven, but after fitting the hammers to the strings - they were allway off - I only needed to needle 4 or 5 notes. To check the fit, I use the middle pedal to lift the damper of the indidual note clear of the string, and then with my index finger press up under the elbow of the jack, and with the third finger press the front of the jack gently to the left or right. Then I pluck the strings and note which if any continues to sing. I prefer filing the high part of the hammer to bending the string. 2) I find that more often the repetition springs are made far too strong. (If you are interested I could elaborate on that). And 3), quite often I find that the damper stop rail is set too low with the result that when you use the pedal, you lose some of your depth of touch, especially around the break in the bass. Which reminds me of the lengthy interchanges about the damper on F20. This note almost never damps properly on Steinday D's beacuse of the absurdity of design which puts just that one damper way out of line. It is certainly that string that is creating the partials that hang on, and I have seen it successfully dealt with only by extending the damper felt at the rear as far back as possible, so that it damps closer to where all the other dampers do. Thanks for your patience and I will now get off my soapbox! I do appreciate the dedication and competence of so many of you that I have worked with, and hope that my comments will be accepted as more constructive than offensive!! Anton Kuerti 76063.737@compuserve.com
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