Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Brand new Sauter sounds brighter than display

If the speed changes then the volume changes. The relevant question is about if regulation can change the tone if a note is played at the same volume before and after regulation.

We need to distinguish between the speed of the finger and the speed of the hammer. The pianist controls the one and the technician the other.

The speed of the hammer at impact is what controls the sound. Of course, the speed of the finger controls the speed of the hammer.

Obviously.

I would imagine that besides the velocity of the initial blow, speed and distance with which the hammer leaves the string after the initial blow may also matter. Of course, the technician can also adjust factors like damper heights, which i can also imagine having an effect on overtonea. Basically, tone colour is a result of a complex interplay between different factors, of which the initial attack (that is most affected by voicing) is only one of many moving parta affecting tone colour.

The velocity of the hammer on impact effects volume which effects tone(louder= brighter) but it's not at all clear to me that the distance which the hammer leaves the string affects anything and would require a reason to convince me. Nor do I see a reason why damper heights would affect anything without further explanation.

Well, one thing I recently learned is that I'm automatically adjusting my playing to the voicing and regulation. Since the hammers were too loud, I was playing so lightly to try to get pp that the keyd weren't bottoming out. It was because my piano wasn't capable of playing very softly in my space. Now (until my tech can come back in July and voice the new hammers down) I've got towels stuffed under the soundboard, and I'm automatically digging in more. When my tech stated his theory that the hammers had to be more quiet, I was in doubt, but then after he left I realized I could close the lid to do a test.

I think regulation and voicing and pianist touch response are all intertwined. You can't really isolate any of them.

To the OP, I think you should get the display piano. My tech said that at the Bösendorfer factory there are several voicers who each have their own ideas of what they like, and thus each piano comes out with its own character. A company like Yamaha would want utmost consistency but a small company like Sauter may have a similar situation as Bösendorfer. And from my own experience, I would never buy I piano I didn't already love. That will likely lead to regret.

In your first paragraph you described a simple and common voicing problem. When the hammers are voiced down you will be probably be able to play more softly. This would be a clear example of isolating voicing from regulation.

You're discussing how loud the piano is and how easy or hard it is to play softly but my comment was about the tonal quality at some specific fixed volume. My post was not about touch response by which I;m guessing you mean how easy or difficult it is to control the piano or how light or heavy the action feels. It is also possible to make a regulation adjustment that can make it easier to play softly but that is different from changing the piano's tone.

My general thoughts...regulation changes will affect tone control. Voicing changes will affect tone itself. Tone is a common variable in both.

But voicing is a relatively small part of overall piano tone. The biggest contributors to a piano's tone are with the overall build of the piano itself. Such as the case, the rim, soundboard, strings, etc.

Volume and tonal quality are essentially paired on a given piano. Dynamic 1 yields tone 1, dynamic 2 - tone 2, etc etc. That's on the most basic level. Then you can do other stuff to tone from there, but all that stuff is locked in, in a strict, mechanical way.

Different pianos do different things to their tone at different dynamics. Some keep a relatively more pure and fundamental harmonic profile across the dynamic range (Bosendorfer), others have more higher harmonic resonance that also increases with dynamics (Steinway). Pianists will generally have preferences, and play pianos in somewhat different ways according to the piano's tonal profile.

The piano does not care if you're jumping up and down and waving your hands or whatever, when it comes to making sounds. Maybe the audience does care (as this adds showmanship), and maybe the musician finds all of this beneficial in order to express the music more fully and naturally.

But all the piano cares about is the hammer hitting the string. This could be done by a machine that simply applies force to the key(s) over time. A robot could give a stunning aural performance if it had the right inputs. The various techniques you see pianists doing are to help them create the fluidity of motion etc needed to play the piano as they're hoping to do -- e.g. like making certain gestures in the hands, arms, or body to feel the crescendo or the rhythm. And indeed some of this is part of pianistic technique that is needed to achieve a certain effect by the musician (it's hard to get dynamics, articulations, etc etc all just right, and pianists develop all kinds of techniques to help them do just this).

But breaking it down on a basic level, the pianist is affecting volume and tone together as a pair with the keystroke. It would be impossible for a piano player, through keystroke alone, to achieve, for instance...Dynamic 1/tone 1, OR dynamic 1/tone 2...on the same piano with the same setup. That's assuming fixed variables for everything else like pedaling and length of time playing the note.

No, I'm not saying that. Regulation will not affect the tone at all, unless you factor in tonal control via the pianist. In other words, it will only change the tone insofar as the player is able to have more control over the underlying tone, with different regulation.

In an ideal world each note of a piano would sound exactly the same before and after regulation. That is if you played it with equal force in exactly the same way. What's more the volume of each note would gradually reduce, note by note, as you played them up the scale. The piano technician would have easy life.

Pianos are not as even as that ideal. Soundboards are all over the map in their response to different frequencies, some notes are stronger, others weaker. Achieving the best tonal balance is no easy task.

When Roger Jolly, the concert technician I mentioned, when he says let off of each note needs adjusting in the piano, he is talking about making subtle changes in the force-distance relationship that determines the speed of each hammer when it hits the strings.

Pianists do not have to worry about all that stuff behinc the fall board, if the tone is better the technician has done a good job.

We do not know how bright Estrellas piano is at all! WE do know that Athedra however now loves the sound of her piano.We do not know what bright means to these people.We do not have a clue how they really do sound.There are sometimes reports of European pianos being bright.There have been reports of August Forster 125 being bright.The Sauter and the CBechstein's and the Bluthner I have tried all within a spectrum of "brightness" There is quite a range.Some Schimmel's are said to be bright.As I have said before my Konzert 136 is not bright.It must of course lie along that spectrum though.It is very similar to some Bechsteins and Sauters I have played, also not dissimilar to the recording of the Sauter in the link I provided above.
So yes the poster quoted here in THIS post probably does have a beautiful sounding piano.I have no idea at all why we have wondered so far from the original post? Why is it SO IMPORTANT to suggest that these members do not have pianos that produce a beautiful tone?

Good. There have been some posters on this thread claiming that regulation affects the tone but I don't think they've given any explanation of how that could be true.

I don't think anything in your lengthy post has anything to do with my post your quoted.

Perhaps you mean your POSTS? "What is written is written"

Angela Hewitt said the piano "blossomed and has a slightly mellower tone:"

Perhaps we should believe what Angela Hewitt said.Not everyone prefers Steinway pianos over others.Of course they are great pianos but Fazioli is a very strong contender.

Bright/mellow muddies the waters sometimes because people describe tonal quality using different language. Some people only use bright in a negative or neutral way. Brilliant is often used for a more complimentary effect.

What’s relevant is that tone only changes (during playing) with volume (ruling out pedal etc), and does so in a fixed way. Volume is determined by force of the hammer. Regulation only affects the action behavior.

So does regulation affect the dynamics? It very well could, depending on the pianist. And with dynamics, tone is also subsequently affected.

But does regulation affect anything essential about the core tonal quality of the piano? No. Most of that is determined already by the piano itself. To some degree, the voicing as well.

This is kind of rehashing what I said before. I can see where different sides are coming from. One case I can think of where regulation would affect tone obviously is if something were really wrong with the action and you could hear it. But that would probably amount to minor repairs rather than just regulation.

Did she say it never had any voicing, even at the factory? Is that what you're claiming is true? That's inconceivable to me. If you think that's true please post the article that says that.

Do you really think a pianist at that level didn't have her tech do any voicing? Not inconceivable, but extremely unlikely. Techs taking care of a piano like that would normally do at least some touch up voicing when they come to tune the piano.