Steinway heavy touch

[Bill Ballard]

At 12:12 AM -0500 6/17/03, Ron Nossaman wrote:
>>I know my stress level is much lower with a 100"/# block than a 
>>175"/# block. And I'm not convinced that a solid tuning necessarily 
>>requires such a tuning pin grip.
>
>Quite the opposite. Beyond certain torque levels, utterly 
>undocumented and conclusively unprovable, it becomes much harder to 
>produce a solid tuning.

"Tests at a major university music department prove......." As 
pinblock grip climbs, the pin is better manipulated with short 
pulses. The higher the friction grip, the more those pulses feel like 
you're slamming you hand and wrist into a brick wall.

Compare this to an action with lead poisoning in which increasing 
levels of forces seem to be met with an increasing "brick wall", as 
the initial moment during which inertial resistance has yet to be 
overcome gets
longer and longer. (Keith Jarrett's  "break-away".) Certainly 
forceful play can be more sensibly approached from a physical 
standpoint, but on the other side of this equation from the pianist 
is the piano action. Force of inertia is far more worrisome than 
gravity, as the former mushrooms with higher force levels and the 
latter stays constant. At this point in discussion on Ptx, we don't 
know where the break point between hard and soft zones occurs in the 
piano's dynamic force range, and lacking that, we can't map out the 
hard zone, to begin to correlate static action loads with RSI. We're 
new at this.

For the time being, I just remind myself that each of these tough 
blocks is less than 1% of the pianos I see. I should sympathize with 
a pianist with a high inertia piano action, because that piano may be 
70% of the pianos he/she plays on.

Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, P.T.G.

"I gotta go ta woik...."
     ...........Ian Shoales, Duck's Breath Mystery Theater
+++++++++++++++++++++