Nobody has really answered my question. What do you do to reduce ear and joint damage, assuming you do not use ear plugs?
Mark, it seems an odd question.
"How do you keep from getting wet without a raincoat?" Oh, I don't go out in the rain.
"You haven't answered my question." Ok... the rain doesn't bother me.
"You still haven't answered my question!" Huh?
For once, I have to agree with Jeff on this one. It is not really how
hard you strike a key but how
fast you do that makes a fortissimo sound. There are more than one client I have who consistently breaks the strings in their pianos.
One of them is a Vegan and has the skinniest arms and thinnest looking hands I have ever seen but plays monstrously difficult and complex classical music (all in a non-equal temperament and prefers that for the qualities it brings to the music, in spite of those who say it doesn't make any difference but that is besides the point). He couldn't be very strong and plays for hours on end. If he were "pounding", he would hurt himself but that is not what he does.
As I observe him play, his fingers attack a key to make a fortissimo sound the way a rattle snake bites. The rattle snake bites with such incredible speed that its victim never knows what is coming and that speed allows the snake's teeth to penetrate deeply in mere 100ths of a second. The snake has delivered its venom and retreated before the victim can even react.
Similarly, this pianist I know can attack a key and get it moving fast enough to make a very loud sound but he does not keep his finger moving in that direction long enough to come to a dead stop and therefore injure himself. He only injures the piano strings!
Now, I have often seen such home made devices as key pounders and I even have a few that have been given to me but I have never used them because I simply have no problem with pain from tuning, even though I am now in my 45th year of it and I routinely tune 4 pianos a day and often more during the busiest season. I also approach tuning in a way that many people cannot imagine doing but I have done it that way ever since I saw the late George Defebaugh and Jim Coleman, Sr. demonstrate it back in 1979.
That is to never, never think that I can tune a piano only once and think that it is either in tune or will be stable after I go through it an tune each string only one time. I know it will not be, so I don't try to fool myself into thinking it will be. So, that only doubles all of the motions that I do.
But does it really mean twice as much stress? No, I don't think of it that way at all. It cuts the stress by half or more. Counter intuitively, it also cuts the time needed to produce a rock solid tuning by at least half of what it takes most technicians.
I try to tell people that but I always get back something like, "Tune a piano twice in 45 minutes? (Often it takes me as little as 30) I could never do that! It takes me at least two hours to get through it once!" Or, something like, "If you have to tune the piano twice, you are not setting the pins correctly".
And Mark, (and Jeff too for that matter), since you are the King of the "slow pull" technique, this is not going to sit well with you but I know what I know from so many years experience and that is that just one, swift movement of the tuning hammer does, in fact, tend to move the entire string across all bearing points and tends to move the entire tuning pin from one end of it to the other and therefore does far more to accomplish the end goal in a split second than any wrenching, pulling, pushing and pounding in at least 10 times the amount of time and energy spent could ever do.
Now, there are certainly times when, particularly in the upper 5th and 6th octaves that it seems that as many times as I might strike the key, the pitch continues to go flat. When I encounter that kind of problem, I have no choice but to sharpen the pitch well above the goal and settle it with repeated test blows.
Recently, when I said something about that, I got a comment from Isaac who said it was because I was not setting the pin correctly. I did not respond to that comment. Believe me, I can make such a recalcitrant string find its correct pitch and hold on to it far more effectively and at least 10 times more quickly by the way I routinely handle it than by using any other far more stressful and time consuming method.
It is the, "Wham, bam, thank you, Ma'am" method, if you will. I am done and out of there and the piano, the next time I tune it, six months, a year or sometimes multiple years tells me that I was the last one there and that no other technician had touched it. So much for the, "You can't tell anything..." theory. I know for sure whether I was the last person to tune a piano, no matter how long it has been.
There are some techniques and feeling for a piano that only come with many years experience. The dealer I do a lot of my work for likens it to the kind of experience an over the road truck driver has. One may say a taxi driver too. How about a chef in a kitchen? 5 years is good, 10 years better but when one gets to the point of 15, 20, 25, 30 and beyond years of touching and feeling a piano every working day of one's life, there is no substitute for that kind of experience.
It is something that is nearly impossible to relate in words alone. One learns through experience just how to strike a key quickly enough to create a loud sound that will cause any residual unevenness in tension across the bearing points to resolve themselves and not cause oneself pain or injury by doing so. One learns to react as well to the change that has been made as a result in an equally split second with more split second corrections.
None of that can be accomplished with wrenching, pulling, pounding and "feeling" the pin move. I feel the pin move, yes, just as I would feel a stuck door move with a swift movement rather than just pushing on it slowly. I have developed the technique to know when a tuning pin has moved or not rather instantaneously. I don't need any more than perhaps thousandth of a second to know it.
As for whether or not ear plugs feel comfortable or not, that is just something one has to get used to. I could not bear to tune pianos without them. Sure, they may feel uncomfortable the first few times they are used, just like a seat belt in the car did to me when I first put one on so many years ago. Now, I don't feel comfortable without a seat belt and I certainly don't feel comfortable tuning a piano unless I have ear plugs in place.
If the sensation of something stuffed in the ears is too uncomfortable, then ear muffs will suffice.
