THE SOUND OF PIANO 

What a great video discussing the most amazing acoustic instrument of all time. I love a good Steinway B. Cheers!

I’ve been in the piano service biz for 45 years…..I tune and voice a LOT of instruments of which I almost always try to do something with the voicing with every tuning I do. When I am replacing hammers on a Steinway it is always a challenge to find the perfect voice. I’ve used every brand of hammer from Renner, Abel, and Steinway factory hammers. Each one has its own texture, and I’m always trying to push the tone to fit the most balanced sound for the instrument. I don’t suppose you’d care to opine on the perfect hammer choice would you?

When I was studying piano at a conservatory in the ‘80s there was a brandnew model A that was supposed to be the ‘good’ one and an old model B (french polished) next to it. I prefered the model B but it needed servicing. The hammers were somewhat dull maybe and the action could do with some lubrication. One could make oneselve impopular by mentioning these things, at that school.

Really a beautiful Steinway, how old is it? I would always prefer an old well restored piano. The modern Steinways and their derivatives are children of a change of taste. The classical music became closer to pop music, louder, brighter, screaming. For me as a classical singer I lover the old pre war pianos, Bechstein, Blüthner, Ibach... An extremely bright and strong piano brings a singer to a limit, he starts to fight against the sound and changes his own tone. Of a dull sound is also not very attractive, the ideal for a singer is the chiara-ecsuro

Not even two minutes into the video I started shaking my head. You know, there ARE people who actually understand what's going inside a hammerhead. They are called concert technicians and the really good ones play a piano for 5 minutes in all it has to offer and they manage to create a 3D image of the tension distribution in the hammer and they know how to needle where, how often, how deep in order to achieve the sound they want to achieve. And now that I am almost done watching this video, I really wonder what it is about. It's pretty much 10 minutes of rambling about hard and soft hammers - and complete carelessness about putting the action back in, strike point of the hammer and constantly telling the audience that this is the only piano, the only Steinway B ever. All of it recorded with a wireless Lavalier mono microphone. Really, what's the point? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lLC_k8Qh3yg.html This is what a well tuned, regulated and voiced Steinway B sounds like, when it's prepared by a real concert technician. And recorded with a decent pair of microphones. BTW, this one is an 85 key Steinway B, so it dates back to 1886.