Is it possible you have a problem here with action saturation? Flexing keysticks? Balance rail is surely bedded. What kind of punchings under the keys? How about a split hammer flange rail? Ed S. In any case, we did file a bunch of felt off the shoulders to make a narrower profile in the bottom 3 1/2 octaves of the piano. We also deed two rounds of the low shoulder needling first about 10x3 pokes (improved the tone a lot) and then another 7x3 (helped some more) on the entire piano. The tone is now much bigger and fuller, with even a bit of growl in the bass (this piano never had any before) and a bit too much "clang" in the high midrange and much of the treble for my taste (but that could be easily dealt with). I listened to a graduate student play on it for a while - and the bass is now audible in context (it wasn't before) but she complained that it was hard to play there - and she found the 6th and part of the 7th octave sort of "dead". The bass still doesn't put out much more than a loud mezzo-forte, and those notes in the 6th and 7th octaves are pretty thin. I have been picking out softer notes in the midrange, tenor and bass, shoulder needling them some more - and they have been coming up to their neighbors. So I guess next time we'll try some more of the same in the bass and that problem treble - and see how much more we can needle out of those hammers before diminishing returns set in. I still think that we will need juice in the bass (but maybe not in the tenor). But I think we'll do some more selective needling and let some students play on it for another week or so before making the decision. Thank you all for all your suggestions (and offers of help, Peter). If anyone has any further ideas based on the results described above, I would be most appreciative... Israel Stein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100727/c48a6659/attachment.htm>
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