New Steinway hammers... was Collodium etc

[Ron Nossaman]

> His logic was that several applications working up to the desired
>result was better than trying to work backwards from too much...I agreed
>wholeheartedly!

Absolutely!

>I'm not a great fan of using artificial means to prop up tone/power. I
>prefer to work with a hammer that has too much and bring it under control.
>The result is far more natural in it's tone colour and balance.

Uh, well, er, ah, how, exactly, does this mesh with that last statement?


>Which brings me to a question I'd like to hear some points of view on-
>
>Why is it so hard to produce hammers that are hard enough? Or why don't
>hammer makers do it, there are plenty of examples of good hard hammers, they
>just take time to work with.

It's not hard at all. Most of the hammers being produced now are already
too hard. The problem, from what I've seen in the last couple of years of
my own work, is producing hammers soft and resilient enough to accommodate
a reasonably well designed soundboard assembly. I feel that most of the
voicing done today is in an attempt to cover, circumvent, or otherwise deny
that the problem isn't with the hammers at all, but with the soundboard. We
don't need harder hammers, we need better soundboard designs... almost
universally.


>I suppose it's a result of the economic approach when you have workers being
>paid by piece work, they complain if they have to work too hard to achieve
>the right result and the factory or the piano buyer complains if the hammers
>are too soft to produce good tone/power, but the workers like it when there
>is little needling to be done.

>I find the American approach of starting with a hammer that is too soft and
>doping it up hard to understand...different culture I suppose?
>
>Cheers
>Mark Bolsius


I rebuilt a Mason & Hamlin "A" earlier this year, with my own soundboard
and rib scale design, that went back to a church in a town about 40 miles
south of where I live. I used Ari Isaac's hammers, which are as soft as any
I've seen, and even did some needling, as was necessary, to smooth out the
voicing. I didn't add any hardeners whatsoever, anywhere in the scale.
Another tech stopped in to visit the piano when she was in that town
recently, and her comment was "What tone!". It's my conclusion, arrived at
by sweat and blood, that voicing is an after-the-fact attempt to bring the
reality of what the soundboard is capable of producing, into the realm of
acceptability. If the soundboard works, you really don't need hard hammers.
Voicing, in fact, becomes mostly unnecessary. Perhaps "culture" does too. 8^)



Ron N