At 12:23 PM -0700 7/16/02, Susan Kline wrote:
>Me too! After four days (blissful, really ...) of tuning a C&A S&S D
>(142... fantastic piano!!!! and much >enjoyed by six or seven really
>lovely pianists)(L'Isle Joyeuse! Rachmaninoff Preludes, Brahms
>Rhapsodie, >Gottschalk 4-hands, Stravinsky Sonata, Dvorak songs,
>Dett pieces I hadn't heard before, etc. etc.) I get >to give a Betsy
>Ross a set of elbows. It all is part of the deal, it all is worth
>doing ...
What am I doing picking up this thread again? I just got back in from
hearing "Quartet for the End of Time", with its lightening fast and
lightening-jagged ensemble-unison melodies followed by breathless
wisps of harmony.
Actually trying to stay on top of a real good thread. And eating ice cream.
>Sorry, I missed Zen's "racket-ball" ... how does this work?
Buy a racquet ball, saw a bass hammer head with the 2" radius to
match, and epoxy together. She showed it to me in KC in '95.
Ingenious, really, it doesn't work by mass as with everyone else's
pounders, but by elastic reaction. She warned me that it would break
keys on older pianos. That never happened, but I was bothered by bass
strings zanging against damper wires, which I couldn't reproduce by
hand. No, I don't believe in it for test blows, nor did she by the
time she showed it to me. It does make a racket with very little
effort.
And what is U.C.?
Una Corda.
>And what was your opinion as you worked? How did it respond to your voicing?
Remarkably! It seemed as though the various dynamic levels were
uncoupled, allowing me to work independently with each. More when I
have time to write.
>Have you had a chance to stand out in the hall and hear it played?
Been alone with the piano, so far. Opening concert of the season is
Thurs evening. I plan to come in part way through the final rehearsal
of the afternoon.
>Are these Steinway hammers?
NY Steinway.
At 6:29 PM +0200 7/16/02, Richard Brekne wrote:
>Ahh.... you can choose to ventilate the room.... but
>personally being heavily influenced by the late 60's I just
>turn on the fan... and point it at myself. :)
The two of us being "of a certain age", you may have noticed my
readiness to get down to the molecular level of events. Wasn't ether
the elixer which fertilized "Les Fleures Maudit"?
At 5:03 PM -0700 7/16/02, David Love wrote:
>This is all assuming that the contribution of "hammer hardeners" is to
>increase stiffness of the individual fibers rather than overall density of
>the hammer. I'm inclined to believe that it's the overall density that
>increases and the flexibility or compressibility decreases as a function of
>that.
As I understand it, reinforcers do three things, one after the other
depending on the dose. First they coat the fibers to slow them down,
thus dampening their elasticity. Next they glue adjacent fibers
together, where these are close enough to have their gap bridged by
the resin, again hobbling the felt mass's natural elasticity. And
third, and most disastrous, they fill in the air space within the
felt mass.
I think David, we have a similar vision of what's happening inside
the felt mass. I don't think that the density of the hammer changes
significantly until the dosage has done the first two stages, and is
turning what used air space into solid resin. That's when the
compressibility is non-existent. (There is no air space in which the
compression can occur.) In the first two stages, I don't think the
amount of solids is enough to affect the density of the felt mass.
But the flexibility of the felt mass is nevertheless affected.
Coating the fibers, and gluing them together at point of adjacency
will definitely stiffen the felt mass, requiring more force to get it
to compress.
All this talk of embalming hammers would lead one to wonder why
anyone would ever want to dope a crown. Well, with NY Steinway
hammers, unless your pianist likes their piano warm and fuzzy, it's
inevitable. You can firm up the shoulders all you want, even
including under the strike point. But the hammer and the string are a
pair of springs, and the best sound comes when the reach their
maximum deformation simultaneously. Power and projection from a NY
Steinway hammer will not emerge until the strikepoint fibers have
been stiffened (and their bending under force slowed). And if I'm
obliged to stiffen, I'd like to stiffening resin to have its own
elasticity to contribute to the hammer/string event.
What I was really looking for two weeks ago as I was mustering
courage to eat this oyster, was an industrial chemist, with a table
of the mechanical properties of these resins. (Who knows, maybe the
real sleeper, the one waiting to be discovered, is epoxy.....) That's
all moot now, as I am measuring these "mechanical properties" by the
sound they produce.
At 11:42 AM -0700 7/15/02, Susan Kline wrote:
>"The shine without the ping" -- yes, that's what I'm after!
>
>Susan
>
>At 11:20 AM 7/15/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>>But a few blows shifting the una corda back
>>and forth as you play will break it up and leave just a bit more shine to
>>the attack without the any unwanted pinging.
I'd bet that if you could stretch that ping out over 8-10 seconds,
what you get is a shine. Kind of like Del's point about how the rate
at which the wire feeds energy into the board having everything to do
with tone quality. It's the same energy, dissipated either abruptly
or deliberately over a longer interval.
Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, P.T.G.
"We mustn't underestimate our power of teamwork."
...........Bob Davis RPT, pianotech '97
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