Dear list, Any time I here that we should want our hammers to be resilient I become perplexed. Resilience is the property of an object to return to it's former shape after it has been deformed by a force. If we really want our piano hammers to be resilient we shouldn't make then out of felt. Felt is pretty far down on the list of resilient materials. Some have said that adding hardeners or compressing the felt with heat will make them less resilient. In fact they become more resilient. Another thing that bothers me is the demonstration of cutting the hammer from the crown to the molding and seeing how far the felt returns to it's pre-pressed shape. This resiliency demonstrated by this is of no consequence. What matters is how the hammer behaves in contact with the strings. A well formed piano hammer will display differing elastic properties depending on how forcefully it impacts the strings. Soft playing requires low resilience. Loud playing requires high resilience. The entire process of bending the felt around the hammer molding is designed to make a hammer with a gradient of density from crown to molding. While it is true that this process increases the overall resiliency of the hammer, creating the gradient, I believe, is more important. I see nothing wrong or evil in using hardeners such as lacquer on hammers (I prefer the term stiffening agents). I realize this is a very unpopular view especially considering all the negative reports both on this list and at many PTG conventions classes. I feel that many of these opinions stem from a lack of information on how to lacquer hammer from the raw state. While there has been a lot of good information on how to top lacquer hammer provided by the Steinway company these techniques will not work to full advantage on a new set of cold-pressed hammers. What is needed is an understanding of deep foundation voicing with stiffening agents. Another reason that hammer lacquering has been condemned is the abuse of the technique in the futile attempt to revive a piano with a dead or dying soundboard. This approach will result in an ever louder attack at the beginning of the note with less tone to follow. Considering that many larger rebuilding shops make soundboards will little or no crown many of us have experienced the frustration of trying to achieve a round tone with enough power in the lower treble and upper tenor areas. No amount of stiffing agent will restore the tone. I believe the present popularity of heavier hot-pressed hammers is that they work better at correcting the above soundboard problems. Heavier hammers will dwell on the string longer. This will shift the energy to lower partials. Lower partials tend to fill out the tone after the attack. I use medium to med. light weight cold-pressed hammers with stiffening agents. My technique yields very consistent results and it is quite fast. I spend almost no time needling the hammers or cutting back the top layers of felt to get to a harder layer. The stiffening agent do most of the work. Another benefit is the long term stability of the voicing. I have come back years later and the hammers only need minor needling, mostly on the strike point. John Hartman RPT
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