On Jun 13, 2009, at 1:53 PM, Sloane, Benjamin (sloaneba) wrote: > My impression is that for the new it's just, you can't ruin a > Steinway Hammer, needle juice needle juice needle juice needle juice > needle juice needle juice needle juice needle juice needle juice > needle juice, mind you, all crown needling, and then people complain > about Steinway hammers. I guess that notion is "out there," but it certainly doesn't correspond to what is being taught in NYC. There is the initial set up, where (starting from raw hammers) the whole set is essentially always saturated (one listens first, but in the classes I attended, every set was drenched). That step is now skipped with the "pre- soaked" hammers. Then you listen and decide. Sometimes no more is needed. Most often some more is needed in the mid to highest treble. Often some is needed elsewhere, and it is applied as and where seems needed. Usually it is only drenched at the very top of the piano, and lesser amounts are applied in other areas, as seems appropriate. Sometimes a third pass is done, at this point pretty precisely (small groups, individual hammers). In the process of moving a piano back and forth from bright to dark in the concert hall (at request of an artist), the preferred method at this point is to use acetone only to bring up. The acetone dissolves some of the solids already in the hammer, and they reset and wick to some extent toward the surface. This can be pretty subtle or pretty dramatic, depending on amounts. Then minor crown needling is used to taper off attack noise, often only in the una corda position (tre corde being affected enough by una corda needling). In any case, with the acetone keytop, the application is only at the very surface, a drop or less to each string groove, of a pretty mild solution. And the results can be quite dramatic. I do think there are people out there who have an impression that limitless amounts of lacquer can continue to be poured into felt. Or that lots of keytop is appropriate at pretty high concentration. I have certainly come across hammers so saturated that a single needle couldn't penetrate. Or if it was "driven home," it would be like a woodpecker hole. With the standard NYC practice, even those hammers that get a third pass are not "solid feeling." The needles "crunch" when entering the felt (you can feel and somewhat hear the lacquer being fractured), and they enter with not much effort at all. Voicing by this method is quite fast, certainly much faster and less physical effort than deep shoulder needling a densely pressed hammer. Final results can be quite similar, though I do think there are some fairly noticeable subtleties that can be achieved with hard pressed hammers that have been deep shoulder needled that aren't available on lacquered hammers (from the point of view of the pianist - but this refers to certain styles and methods of playing the instrument, and not really to the concerto literature and style). It certainly isn't a matter of black and white. They are far more similar than different (assuming someone with skill has dealt with both). Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu
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