Hey David Good and practical Advice. Sampling is smart in these cases.Thanks for the encouragement on trying the Abels. This Grotrian 9 ft.really responded well to what was definitely a very hammer specific application & it saved me a lot of work & created the right sound for this piano. It's original hammers were Renners of some kind & though worn out some of them were voiced well nearing optimal tone for the intrument in the killer octaves. So... With a no. 6 needle a quick acupuncture test determined what kind of hammer stiffness this board was responding to & was asking for & this guided my decision to use the Abel performance hammers by piano tech. I hung on samples of Renner blues & the Abels. It was Abels hands down in this case. BTW Barabara...This is not the usual Abel provided by Brooks LTD. It is a massively heavy & wide hammer as were the original equipment. The shape was all sucker shaped & wrong & it was necessary to grind off much unneeded felt to get a nicely serpentine shape, which dropped a lot of overall weight. With proper shaping,installation & strike points the piano sounded all most optimal from note 1 to note 53 right after being installed & with only a very very thin bit of juice in the bass to give it more presence,focus & growl. Across the bass break I applied about three or four drops of the same thin solution on the strike point of the first octave or so to pick up a little shine on the sound.(break in fluid) The only needling required so far was from notes 54 thru approx 70. These hammers are stiff but they worked well with this board and scale. I will follow it up in it's home environment & dial it in a bit more but I don't anticapte much more is needed. Dale Erwin it. > >I think you can draw the conclusion that generally speaking the lower the >tension and lighter (or less stiff) the board the softer the hammer that is >required. One problem is that not all scales match the boards they are on. >You see low tension scales on a relatively stiff boards, high tension scales >on loose boards and all kinds of combinations both by design and because of >changes in the s/b assembly over time. In those cases it's not clear to me >what the best hammer will be as soundboard response will vary and in >different ways. In those cases, sampling will have a better chance of >steering you in the right direction. > >David Love >davidlovepianos at comcast.net >www.davidlovepianos.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20061008/75d964c5/attachment.html
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