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Piano Action Rebuilding - For A Customized Playing Experience
25 years experience in engineering design allow me to offer a complete cutting edge action rebuilding service encompassing:
- Inertial Touch Consultation
- Action Manufacture & Rebuilding
- Modern Actions for Chickering or Vintage Grand Pianos
Inertial Touch Consultation
This is an on-site service. Its purpose is to resolve touch issues which have not been satisfactorily addressed by standard regulation procedures or key and action repairs.
Here are a few situations where it can be a life saver:
- discomfort or frustration with the touch of your piano
- difficulty controlling fast passages
- difficulty shaping legato lines
- the piano is dictating how you interpret and shape your musical lines
- practice is tiring or painful
- repetitive stress injuries
- an aging pianist needs to adjust the touch for aging muscles
Using computer aided analytic tools, by analyzing component action ratios, key weights, hammer weights and regulation specs, I quantify the inertial touch factor. This inertial touch factor will locate for me precisely where on the touch continuum this action lies.
Having quantified the inertial touch, I can then precisely prescribe leverage and weight adjustments which will target and hit the new desired inertial touch factor.
The protocol is predictable, and repeatable, because the action’s geometry, ratios and weights all have clear mathematical relationships… as long as one knows how to read them.
With this protocol I can also analyze an action that a client may not own but really likes to play, and reproduce that touch precisely in a new or rebuilt action.
My fee for a 3-1/2 hr Inertial Touch Consultation is $350.
Action Manufacture and Rebuilding
In a new or rebuilt action, the above Inertial Touch Consultation is used to target the regulation specs and inertial touch factor the client prefers.
Then the action geometry is computer designed and optimized to achieve the pre-determined targets. Original keys and key frames are reconfigured, restored or replaced with new keys. New shanks, repetitions, back checks, capstans installed in optimized geometric locations to manage targeted friction. New hammers and hammer weights are matched to existing or new soundboard impedance levels. This results in an artist level custom playing experience. [MORE INFO]
Modern Actions for Chickering Grands
Chickering Grand Pianos were and are fine pianos. They feature a tonal aesthetic that values a singular round mellow voice different than most modern pianos. There are many pianists, myself included, who absolutely love the Chickering sound, and prefer it to many other fine pianos.
There is however a problem with placing Chickering Grands in modern service.
Although Chickering actions were well designed, pianist friendly actions, the original actions contain parts that are unavailable today. This means that modern replacement parts are not available to rebuild the actions. In addition to this, the action’s radial configuration is very different from the way actions are made today, and they contain fragile brass flanges. All these factors mean it is expensive to work on Chickering actions. As a result many techs are intimidated by them, and avoid or refuse to work on them.
This “non-standard” problem often removes these fine pianos from the marketplace, or at least makes it seem like they are no longer instruments to be considered seriously.
Since the instruments have such singular and excellent tonal potential, I am dedicated to keeping these pianos in the marketplace and playing.
To this end, I design new key frames and actions, replacing the original action with a new modern action. I design a new geometry which is at least as efficient as the original geometry, straighten out the stack so it is easy to regulate with current skill sets, use modern replaceable parts, and eliminate the dreaded brass flanges. This action re-design allows these excellent instruments to give another generation of serious and discerning pianists great pleasure.