Seating/false beats

[Horace Greeley]

Bob,

I simply must go away somewhere and figure this all out.

Someday.

Anyway, further comments follow:

>
>Dear Greelosaurus Rex,
>

Egad! Yet another moniker!

>I'm with you on how pleasant it is for a tuner to sit in the audience and
>hear nothing but music. No SPAANNNG or tick-tick or wah-wah-wah. I don't
>think many people would argue against hard  _test_  blows, but I think the
>discussion has been about hard blows to do the actual tuning. My goal is to
>have good enough lever technique to be able to tune with light blows, then
>have the [very hard] test blow do nothing whatsoever. Obviously it doesn't
>always work, but most of the time; often enough that it saves major wear on
>the ears and fingers, and I suppose a little on the piano as well.
>

Thanks for making my point here, Bob.  I've come to realize that a great
deal of what I have done over the years is absolutely not the norm for most
technicians.    What you recommend is precisely what Braide White (to
invoke the demiurge) taught, recommended, and used in his own practice.

For both tuning , voicing , and even regulating work, I deliberately drive
the piano into distortion.  I _want_ the top end of the dynamic range (both
as to tuning and voicing) to be well past whatever "normal" might be for a
given instrument.  The reason is that, if the instrument is stable (and, at
least listenable) at those levels, then, for most purposes, it will be just
fine - thank you very much.  If it's not, then is the time to begin to
figure out why.

All of this is very much like developing the tone on any other instrument.
As a performer, if you do not work   (constantly) to expand your dynamic
range, it shrinks (- and Lord knows, a good many pianists nowdays need all
the help they can get in that department).    While this means different
things for different instruments, for wind players there are three main
components:  1.- The ability  to maintain a constant pressure throughout
the duration of a given "breath"; 2.- The ability to maintain a constant
velocity of the air column; and, 3.- The ability to vary (at will) the
volume of air in the air column.  While these are clearly closely related,
they are different functions,  each requiring different technical
development.  The bottom line, is that not only does one learn to have good
tone and control at the top of the dynamic/tonal range, the control
required there _at the same time_ develops the control of the bottom of the
range as well.

>From the standpoint of the piano, this means finding the weakest part of
the scale, and working with it to generate the largest volume of sound
(commensurate with overvoicing to the point at which things start to get
thin and "stringy", although some folks _like_ that...) and _then_ voicing
the rest of the piano to match.    The problem, of course, is that a lesser
pianist will find the instrument difficult, if not impossible to control -
BUT, then, you have the luxury of cutting things back, rather than fighting
for more sound.

>As has been previously mentioned, there is on some pianos the phenomenon of a
>test blow hard enough to pull enough string temporarily through the bearing
>points that the string goes sharp over the next minute or two, so there's the
>tradeoff (my favorite word concerning pianos) between hard enough to make
>sure the pianist can't do any permanent damage to the unison, and not so hard
>as to get a "false positive." Once again the word "judgment" rears its ugly
>head.
>

"If you bash it (and set the pins), it won't move."


>As far as seating strings goes, all this talk about tapping makes me wonder:
>supposing the string does ride up the pin, how much pressure can it take to
>get it to go back down? I would think that light pressure with a  unison-wide
>stick would do the job. After all, with downbearing and all, the string
> _wants_  to go back down.
>

An excellent point - I use a thin screwdriver with a highly annealed end,
self notching, as it were.  Using Richard Davenport's technique, I hold the
screwdriver in my left hand (being right handed) with my thumb over the
(handle) end.  I then strike my thumb with the heel of my right hand.  If
my left thumb hurts, I'm striking too hard.


As a further aside, sort of, I should note that I consider  (and tell all
my clients that I consider) strings, hammers and dampers to be immdiately
depreciable items.  That is, as long as you can make 'em work, do so.  If
they get too funky, throw 'em away and start over.  This nonsense about
having things like that last for decades is entirely too dependent on a
curve massively skewed by the number of home instruments which never have
anything done to them.  Real concert/studio/teaching instruments simply
have a different set of rules.  Yes, I know that there are a few
exceptions, but then, Mendel didn't get everything right about genetics,
either.

More later.

Best to all.

Horace




Horace Greeley			hgreeley@leland.stanford.edu

	"Always forgive your enemies,
		nothing annoys them so much.

			-	Oscar Wilde

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