[CAUT] touch & tone & tuning (was why does it feel better?)

[ReggaePass at aol.com]

List,

All of this discussion about how chnaging one aspect of a piano's character affects the perception and experience of other aspects is very interestsing indeed.  It made me want to share something that happened here at the school recently and pose some questions for the lists feedback.


Greetings CAUT Brethern and Sistern (?),

I write to you today to report an interesting experience we have had at CalArts this past semester.  For some of you, this information is “yesterday’s paper.”  For others, it may be a welcome introduction.  

It all began innocently enough with a complaint about inadequate repetition on a particular note of one of our performance pianos.  Going over the regulation adjustments with a fine toothed comb helped a bit, but fell short of an adequate remedy.  The hammers have been filed a few times and, as you've probably guessed by now, there was insufficient hammer weight for good repetition (upweight in the upper teens as opposed to the mid twenties).  Judicious application of “small” and “mini” binder clips to the hammer shanks enabled a substantial improvement in repetition. (The clips are readily available through your local office supply store for just pennies each and may be fine tuned for weight by sliding large center pins into to holes left open after removing the “ears” upon installation of the clip itself.)  

As with other maladies that rear their ugly heads, if something has gone bad with one note, it’s usually a good idea to check the others.  Sure enough, they all benefited from increased down and up weights via shank clips (and the attendant re-regulation of rep. spring tension, rep. lever height, drop, backchecking and parameters affecting aftertouch.)  Hammer replacement is scheduled at the next available opportunity, but this looked to be a good “bridge” measure to hold us over until then.

So far, nothing unusual about all that.  What we thought was worth sharing was this: Although we hadn’t told our community of pianists that we had done anything at all, unsolicited praises and adulation (what a breath of fresh air!) immediately started coming in about the great voicing work we had allegedly done.  Sometimes it is tempting to take credit for something you haven’t done but are credited for anyway—like when you clean the keys and it feels so much nicer to touch that someone thinks you performed major action work.  But in this instance, we decided to tell the truth and leveled with them about what we did with the clips.  Their response to the operation was so positively unanimous that we proceeded to perform the same operation on other grands whose up and down weights were getting a little lean.  Again, we didn’t prejudice anyone by telling them what we had done, and again, players noticed welcomed improvements in both touch AND tone.

It is common knowledge that, ultimately, touch and tone are inseparable issues.  This is as important an axiom for piano players as it is for us technicians.  But we were really surprised.  Had the additional weight been added in the form of newer, high-quality hammers of the proper weight, the improvements would have been quite predictable.  But to sound noticably better as a result of simply adding more weight to the shank in the form of a cousin to the paper clip came quite unexpectedly.  This held true for a variety of pianos of different makes and models, and was noticed by faculty and students alike.  What can we surmise from this?  That something in the players approach to the otherwise same instrument resulted in improved tone, something elicited by greater strike weight and the attendant regulation adjustments in pursuit of better repetition "improved" the tone?

This technique has been covered in convention classes before: A Bosendorfer voicing class and Richard Davenport’s “Prelude to Hammer Replacement” come to mind.  (Davenport mentioned extensive use of shank clips as an alternative to doing nothing at all in situations where hammer replacement and all that should go with it are not an option for economic reasons.)  In our recent experience at CalArts we had such dramatic feedback that we felt compelled to offer our testimonial.  Does this scenario ring a bell for any others out there?

Thanks,

Alan Eder RPT