Perhaps you could space just the offending section (half octave?) so that it doesn't miss the left string.
I don't know what you mean by not having enough room to voice between the string cuts. Doesn't matter how thin the hammer is, the amount of space between will be the same (the strings haven't moved). If shift is minimized, so that the hammers are shifted only half the distance between strings, there should be enough space to do shift voicing between strings and to the left of the left string, unless the hammers are so narrow there isn't that much felt outside the three strings - which would be extreme. Using finer needles helps with this, as the coarser ones (#5, #6, or whatever) we use for shoulders don't do crown work really well. #10 and #12 penetrate that dense felt without just tearing holes, so they make a pretty significant and controllable tonal change. In fact, I occasionally have had complaints of too much contrast.
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Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm@unm.edu http://fredsturm.net "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination." - Einstein
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Original Message:
Sent: 12-22-2012 14:40
From: Mark Dierauf
Subject: Damper oink in shift position
This message has been cross posted to the following Discussions: CAUT and Voicing .
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I'm tuning at a recording studio tomorrow morning with an old Steinway Bre-bellied about 30-40 years ago and re-actioned about 5 years ago with (I believe) Abel hammers. The piano has always had a pretty severe damper-oink with the shift pedal in full position, right at the top of the agraffe section. Recently, I was able to reduce this pretty significantly by tipping the damper heads very slightly so the rear damper pad begins to lift before the front pad. I tipped them as far as possible without degrading damping. In the past I had tried adjusting the shift stop screw such that the hammers didn't clear the left-hand strings, but the artists didn't like the resultant loss of tone color that the shift had provided. In addition, as the action rebuilder thinned the new hammers quite a bit, there's really not a lot of room for needling between the string cuts. Am I missing something? Are there any other techniques for minimizing this phenomenon?
- Mark
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Mark Dierauf
Concord NH
603-225-4652
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