All this talk of hand held sledge hammers makes my ears ring. I have always been an advocate of the "moderate" test blow. In most pianos you can feel if you have stability in the feedback from the tuning hammer. When you feel that there might be some unequal tension in the string segments THEN you bang. Otherwise if you don't feel that from the hammer a moderate blow is sufficient. Ben McKelveen wrote an article in the Journal a couple of years ago about not destroying the piano, your hands and your ears by the "test blows" that some recommend. I heartily agreed and wrote to tell him so, but that point of view has been drowned out by the test blows of the masses. I tune for some very heavy players here at SMU. Our artist in residence teaches the William Kapell technique and "forte playing" and I have the broken strings to prove it. I've still found that you can have stability without destruction. Dave Porritt, RPT SMU
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