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A questlon arising from the Fazioli soundboard thread, do spruce soundboards tend to become more resonant and responsive with use in the first year or two?

Yes, but it may take longer.

Being played a lot helps a piano break in. Red spruce comes up more slowly than Sitka or the other Spruces.

One cannot distinguish changes that are due to the soundboard from changes that are due to the strings and hammers.

BDB's comment should read, "I cannot distinguish changes that are due to the soundboard from changes that are due to the strings and hammers."

I asked my guitar tutor the same question about my hand-made acoustic guitar. Of course he answered by saying that the more I played it the better it will sound. It took me a few seconds to understand what he meant
Ian

No, soundboards do not. Entropy is the law of the universe. But...stability has to happen with the inter-connectivity of all the parts. Mostly the felt parts.
-chris

it's very obvious with violins, shouldn't it be similar with acoustic pianos?

ben
CRW190

I have a friend who makes violins, and he believes that the difference between a violin which is new and one that has been played for a while is in the strings. He tried putting strings that had been used for a while on one of his new violins, and felt that made the difference that is attributed to the violin being "played in."

In a certain sense, a piano (a good one) goes through much the same stages as a human being...infancy...childhood...adolescence...adulthood and maturity...

Then it peaks at some point and begins going downhill towards agedness and it's associated idiosyncrasies...then gradually declines toward (you fill in the blank).

Of course, good environment and a nourishing diet of maintenance (including major body part replacement) can extend its lifespan to some degree...whereas abuse, neglect, and poor lifestyle choices can significantly decrease the enjoyment.

Peter Grey Piano Doctor

So your friend the violinmaker is an expert on piano soundboards too? And this is what you base your opinions on?

I believe some soundboards improve with age. I would not use the term resonant though. I would say some soundboards mellow, others sing better over time, others have an increased range etc or some combination. Some soundboards decline for sure and sound best when new. The speed at which any of this happens is dependent on a variety of factors, some have already been mentioned.

I do believe that soundboards over time become less impeded ( less stiff ). If they were originally too stiff, the sound will improve, sometimes noticeably. BDB's point about not being able to distinguish between the sound of the strings, the soundboard and the hammers is not completely without validity. It takes a lot of experience and experimenting to be able to develop this ability and I would say that even after more than 20 years of thinking deeply about this and doing just about every experiment possible ( the only thing you really can't do is keep the original strings and change the soundboard ) I am still often surprised when for instance the only thing that gets changed are crappy corroded strings to brand new strings and the sound doesn't improve much. Or when crappy hammers are the only thing changed out and the sound doesn't improve much. Or when a good looking soundboard that checks all the boxes still doesn't sound that great, and after trying different hammers on it and even after changing some strings it still doesn't sound that good, but a new board ( with new strings of course) changes everything and then the piano sounds amazing.

One of the main sources of my beliefs about soundboards changing over time is from more extreme examples. I have seen pianos that I knew prior to their soundboards cracking and they sounded significantly better after the soundboard cracked. Of course I have also observed the opposite. I have also observed pianos of the same make, model and year in which one had a cracked board and sounded significantly better than the other with a non cracked board and vice versa.

So, as with all things piano, the answer is......."it depends".

I was responding to a post about violins.

I can explain exactly why I do not believe anyone can distinguish changes in sound due to the age of the soundboard from changes due to strings or hammers. It is simple: you cannot change the soundboard without changing the strings. We can hear the difference between old strings and new strings. We can change hammers quite a bit by the simplest voicing techniques. The position at which the hammers hit the strings is affected depends on the spacing of the hammers and strings, and that changes if you change the soundboard. So we have two factors that we know change the sound, and we cannot test for the soundboard without changing them, so I do not see how anyone can distinguish which come from the soundboard, the strings, or the hammers.

If you disagree, you should be able to explain how you do it to everyone.

If you have a piano that has sound problems such as a percussive attack, quick decay, lack of power etc You can attempt many voicing techniques and tone building techniques and not achieve satisfying improvements. You can try different strike points. Different hammer weight. etc etc.
You can experiment with different hammers of different design and try all sorts of the above with insufficient improvement.
You can keep the hammers and change the strings with insufficient improvement.
You can keep the hammers and change the strings and also attempt all of the above with insufficient improvement.
You can do everything above and try to alter the existing board to increase or decrease its impedance in different areas with insufficient improvement in addition to every above permutation.
You can change the soundboard, use the same type of strings and stringing as what was used when only strings were changed, keep the original hammers and get a massive improvement.

There are even several more variables that I haven't listed ( improving terminations, changing bridges while keeping original board, experimenting with downbearing as a few examples ) that can be tried.

I agree that in the last scenario, you cannot definitively say that the problem with the original board was from age rather than design, material, or execution of design. You also cannot say that insufficient improvement or massive improvement are anything more than subjective.

However, when you have regularly experimented with all of the above, you do learn quite a bit about when the problem may be the existing soundboard or something else.

BTW, I am all for keeping the original board if that is the right thing to do for that client and that piano. I really don't care if we install a new board rather than save an old board if the result is excellent and lasting and the client is happy.

The difficulty of having the conversation lies in the fact that the piano functions as a synergistic system, things like strings, hammers, and the soundboard collectively create the tone of the piano based on a multitude of factors and interdependencies. That does not mean that it is impossible to do, as Keith says it takes a lot of time, experience, and thought to learn to do it well. If you want to be a good voicer and/or a good rebuilder who is aspiring to do the best work, you need to learn to do this because a piano can be a uncooperative SOB, and you need to be able to separate things well in order to solve problems. You can't fix it if you don't know where the problems are.

Let me give you a recent example from my own experience: I am just now completing the final voicing and regulation on a 1911 Steinway O. It has a new first growth red spruce soundboard that came from a conservation cut in a protected stand in West Central Maine and seasoned for 7 years before becoming a piano soundboard. The piano was hybrid strung with nickel plated Paulello plain wire, and Paulello nickel plated bronze and iron bass strings. WNG action with Weikert felt hammers from a good and reliable supplier. The piano was strung and tuned to pitch, hammers installed and voicing begun. Now, Adirondack red spruce is notoriously slow in coming up to its full measure. The treble end of a strung piano always comes up more slowly, and the top treble section later still. Indeed, the last octave last of all. Pluck test indicated that the board wasn't giving a lot, and the top treble was phoning it in. So, do I have a disappointing board, I wondered.

To complicate things, my voicing wasn't going to plan with these usually consistent and reliable hammers. They were giving me considerable worry because needling, filing, doping, etc. was not giving much in results. But my needling did give me an important clue. The top 2 to 3 mm. of felt was extremely soft. Below that was harder felt that had a feel that was good. So these hammers came off, and a set from another supplier, also Weikert felt, was installed. These had the opposite problem, one of extreme aggression (like a brick smashing you in the face) tonally. The felt was ridiculously hard, and took an obscene amount of needling to start getting some sustain and volume. Indeed, it was like pulling teeth to get anything out of the board. I knew that much of the problem lay in the hammers, and my efforts were slowly and continually yielding results. After much more voicing, the hammers finally started to wake up and the board kept gaining sustain and volume. And then it kept improving, to the point that a large dynamic range emerged and we could say that it was a good piano in the bass and tenor. More voicing brought the mid-treble up, and the greenheart bridge caps in the top two sections were very clear and present, with excellent volume and sustain, speaking the melody line very well. In the past week, the top treble section has come alive and I believe it will now be good to very good. That again is due to voicing finally bring forth results from these very hard hammers. Pluck tests were now showing more sustain and volume than before. The piano is now in The Little White Church in Eaton, New Hampshire and the two musicians who have been critiquing my voicing with me are now thrilled beyond words at what the piano is becoming. It has its own unique voice and colors.

The moral of the story is that it took a long while for the board to come into its own, a very long while. I had a bad set of first hammers, and the second set gave way grudgingly. I didn't know until near the end just how good the board was going to be. And I didn't know for a long time how much that second set of hammers was going to allow me to do. All this time, I had to have my thinking cap on and make good decisions about the voicing while being mindful of what is going on with the board.

Thank you all for a good discussion. Ageing certainly affects the acoustic properties of wood, maybe more quickly in violins and guitars than pianos, and perhaps not always for the better in pianos.

I do not know how Adirondack red spruce compares with Ciresa red spruce. No doubt both are carefully selected for Truitt and Fazioli pianos to come up to their "full measure" in the end.

The sound of the Fazioli in question had blossomed a year or two after it arrived in a crate for an Angela Hewitt recital. It seems there had been minimal voicing so the more opulent sound may well emanate from the soundboard.

Richard Dain of Hurstwood pianos told me soundboards can have over 600 resonant frequencies. He said the ideal was to make the resonances coincide with the 88 notes but in practice some are closer than others. Putting two and two together, I imagine the Fazioli board has become more responsive to the overtones around its resonances

Some 300+ year old violins are highly sought after. Piano soundboards often have lost their crown by 120 years, if not sooner in some climates. I'm not sure where the limits of the comparison are.

300 year old pianos are highly sought after, but that is for their historical value. They are not the same as modern pianos. Even older harpsichords and clavichords are prized, especially if they have their soundboards. Of course, none of those instruments were built with crowns, so there are a number of questions that one could ask, like, "what does the crown do?", "is crown necessary?", and "what constitutes crown?"

"May well" as a qualifier is fully consistent with BDB's position that it is not easy to identify the source of the improvement in sound.

If a year or two of aging the soundboard would make that much difference, I'd expect Fazioli to pre-age them. At the price they charge, the buyer should have the ability to assess the tone that will be generated by the broken in instrument. As to my own view, I'm skeptical that Fazioli would cut corners like that.

You forget to compare how many violins and how many pianos survive for 100+ years.