Day 12 : Una Corda

I went back to the Vose yesterday, returning to the smoothness of the newly scrubbed key surface radiating in the afternoon sun. 

Given the unplayable state of the Vose’s tuning, it felt like I had been embalming a dead instrument.  

I ran my fingers over the surface, deforming it, depressing keys, but only so far & with less velocity than it takes to throw a hammer.

I made little silent pulses, trying to anticipate the rarefaction, trying to turn pulses into a compete angular cycle.

I drag my finger points of contact forward & back along the keys they are pulsing & notice the change in force needed to throw a hammer tracking distance from the fulcrum.

I can also feel the force needed to throw a hammer tracking along pitch.  & I can see why:  The hammers get progressively larger as the pitch lowers.  Perhaps a properly regulated action set would account for this.  But I can feel the different weights of the hammers.  Simply acknowledging this allows me to compensate for the difference rather well. 

With all ten fingers on white keys I pump against the surface.  Then I visually confirm the level of force needed just to get all 10 hammers to jump, just a little.  Then I gradually increase the force & watch the hammers rise up, up, up toward the harp strings. 

I have the sostenuto pedal depressed with my right foot, the “silent’ hammers make a dull rhythmic “clunck clunck clunk…” sound which wafts up some resonance in with all the dampers lifted.

As I bring the line of pulsing hammers closer to the plan of harp strings, occasionally one hammer connects, the sound rings like a bell.  I notice which finger sent it & adjust my line of pulses.  This feels a bit like using an angle grinder.  

I then notice the long distance the hammers have to travel in silence.  All of this force is needed just to get to zero.  

Perhaps because of this, when the hammers do connect with the strings the velocity is quite high.  The feeling is that the softest sound i can make is actually quite strong sounding, feels like it goes from zero to mp especially when the pulses are rapid.  I sort of wish there was a way to dim this.

Then I look down & find the answer has already been laid at my left foot.

I connect my left foot to the Una Corda pedal.  

I feel the entire action & key surface nudged to the right by the pedal mechanism.

I feel a shift in the dynamic level.  Now, the hammers seem to be landing at the soft onset I wanted earlier.

Holding down the sustain pedal with my right foot, I practice tone pulses raising & lowering the left foot with each breath cycle.

Sort of feels like a cross between learning to palm-mute the guitar strings, & learning to step the highhat. 

Also sort of feels like a CPR training class.

I note that I no longer see this pedal as a special feature to be engaged on occasion, for some special quiet passages.  I recognize that the right foot Una Corda should now be considered part of my core tone production posture, as a dynamic counter weight to each downward press.  It seems obvious now, otherwise why would the piano designers go to all this trouble to provide this control?  Because it is essential to operating this instrument in a musically dynamic way.

Also, as I was doing all the above, I kept noticing one or two keys that were out of tune.  My tuning hammer is always with me, even though I had given up trying to tune the Vose a few months aga, when some of these keys stopped gripping inside the key block.  

Almost in desperation I found myself reaching for the tuning hammer & by force of habit found myself wrenching one of the pegs.  Without analysis I felt my arm muscles tune the string in with its neighbors.  It turns out that two of the strings sounded by this horrible sounding key stoke were well in tune.  Just needed the third one to be brought in line- to make it sound like ‘una corda’.  

To my astonishment, the peg held the tension.  Could it be the change in temperature from the cold days of winter has changed the force of the wooden tuning block?  Or perhaps it’s just this peg.

As I rolled through the beating 10 tone pentatonic cluster (one Winged Victory shaped pentatonic in each hand).  I discerned that the tonal proportions of lower pentatonic sounded quite nicely as expected.  Most Triumphant.  Approved.  As the pentatonic stairway projected upward it became obvious that two additional tones were both slightly off center from the tonality laid out below, as well as fully at war internally (one string way out).

Letting 9 tones fall away I centered on one of the two.  I raised my left foot (lowering the dampers) & I let one arrow fly long.  Holding the offending key against the key bed I muted 2/3 of the ringing strings with my finger & quickly determined that again only one was at wide variance of its fundamental.  I struck the key again, listened to it settle, & then with the other hand adjusted the tuning hammer on its peg.  I didn’t try to fix it at first.  I applied force to the tuning hammer such that I could hear the string go sharp of center, then flat, sharp again.  I understood the range which was incredibly narrow but ultimately reliably navigable, the peg seemed to be holding the changes in pitch when I let go.  Then I dialed it in, & not just the string, I felt the standing phase interference in the wood, standing in the room, filling its air.  I felt my hand take control of the one frequency & merge it straight into the other.  When the two waves reached unison (cancellation) it felt a if the two tones had each traveled through a separate ear & each were now centered, overlapped in a spot just behind my eyes.  The sing key felt as though the hammer had just been replaced from tin foil to new soft velvet.  Significantly less high frequency spike audible from each attach relative to big warm additive interference among the three unison fundamentals.  

I did the same to the other main offender.  Rode the WV shape across tonal key centers.  Looking for notes that pulling in the less-good way.  Found & fixed many quite directly.  Before long the tonality of the entire keyboard was again a green pasture.  I was soften the tiniest phase spikes among the highest & lowest registers.  & all the tuning pegs seem to hold.  

I played BWV 846.  

I played Fur Elise.

I played the first part of Debussy’s Arabesque No.1 (the part I still remember).   

Practice Ends