alcohol voicing (was: Reactionary curmudgeon)

[Bill Ballard]

At 12:27 PM -0700 9/6/00, Susan Kline wrote:
>At 08:02 AM 09/06/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>>Susan
>>Would you be blocking the dampers up and raising the hammers to about let
>>off to reach the  shoulders or hammer tips with the "juice"?
>>
>>Paul Chick
>Hi, Paul,
>I think that Bill Ballard's suggestion of
>using a long pipette sounds the most reasonable. A 6" stem sounds
>long enough to rest the tip on the hammers without raising them.
>I'm quoting Bill's post, below. He should probably tell you how it
>works, since it seems he has done it, instead of just thinking
>about it.
>
>Susan

Actually I don't do it that often. It's my experience that any of 
these liquids (reinforcers or softeners) only get you in the 
ballpark. (Remember Wally Brooks' distinction between tone regulation 
and voicing?) And in that ballpark stage of things, you're generally 
doing groups of hammers. The time saved by not sliding the action out 
on your lap is lost by not being able to do a whole run of hammers 
with one sweep of the hand, that is being obliged to move the tube 
from one between-the-string entry to the next. But as the ballpark 
work progresses you'll come down the few remaining recalcitrant 
hammers which seem to take slower to the treatment. By that time 
you've also grown tired pulling the action out by its keyframe guide 
pins.

BTW, you really only need one of this pipettes in your toolbag. How 
many different sauces would you like to apply this way, ProTek, white 
vinegar, plastic/acetone, alc/water, Snuffles/alc? The solids 
involved which might remain in the bulb after a day or two's 
evaporation are nearly mutually exclusive in their solvents. Is the 
acetone used in reinforcing going to dissolve the residue for the 
previous charge of ProTek. If the next use after vinegar is 
alc/water, will whatever residue they might pick up contaminate their 
work in hammer softening (we're not talking red wine vinegar here). 
But @ $18.50 for 500, you're not going to run out of them anytime 
soon.

The other advantage, as Tom McNeil points out is that you can have a 
bulb of acetone rolling around on top of a brand new lacquer finish 
all day long with no chance of the contents seeping out to do any 
damage.

I forget to mention the Cat # in the earlier post. It's R9293. There 
are 10 separate styles of these puppies.

Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, PTG

"There are fifty ways to screw up on this job. If you can think of 
twenty of them, you're a genius......and you aint no genius"
     ...........Mickey Rourke to William Hurt, in "Body Heat", discussing arson.