Humidity & voicing

[Horace Greeley]

Hi, Marcel,

At 12:18 PM 11/25/2005, you wrote:
>I'm noticing some voicing changes with humidity changes. Have any of you
>noticed the same. I suspect the hammers get harder when dry. There is a
>different quality to the attack compared with the same in damper summer
>weather.
>
>I'd like to find out how these factors affect others on the list.

Yes, very definitely.  It seems to depend on any number of 
factors...type of hammer (hard/soft pressed), how (if at all) the 
hammer has been "treated", etc.

I've had some interesting experiences with instruments used in 
less-than-perfect conditions with things as off the wall as simply 
"drying" the hammers out a bit with a hair dryer.  In one such case, 
the instrument was an S&S B which lived in a jazz club which was 
located under a pier...the ocean literally just steps from the outer 
wall and what might be called primitive HVAC.  Anyway, among the 
other problems the instrument had, the voicing changed radically and 
rapidly, sometimes in the course of half a set.  One rainy day, the 
instrument was particularly mushy sounding and there was no time to 
do anything "properly", so I borrowed a hair dryer and, in the 15 
minutes before the house opened, madly heated up the hammers.  While 
certainly not perfect, there was enough improvement to get through the evening.

The longer term remedy was to wait until the club was closed the next 
week, and then to flood the hammers with a 10:1 Lacquer Thinner to 
Lacquer solution and then let it sit for a couple of days to fully 
dry out.  (I chose not to use Acetone specifically because I wanted 
the hammers to be as consistently treated as possible.  Acetone 
flashes off too quickly for something like this.)  There was some 
shaping and needle work to be done, but less than I had imagined 
there would be.  Best was that the voicing was then at least 
nominally stable for the balance of the season.

To be sure, one would have had to try something different on an 
instrument with different style hammers.

Best.

Horace