Thanks Ric, David, I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who thinks this way. I guess I just find it odd that so many of our colleagues think this "monochrome" tone is the epitome of piano sound. I'm thankful Vince is here to teach. Ric, our loss is your BIG gain with Eric! He has been a mentor and dear friend so I hope he will keep the ties here. Regards, Jim Busby BYU -----Original Message----- From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Richard Brekne Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 3:49 PM To: caut at ptg.org Subject: [CAUT] Tone "contrast"; Was - The "new" S&S Hammers. Hi Jim. I wouldnt for a second say you are an idiot for getting bored with "pretty pianos". At least as I think I understand you to mean by the term. In my tenure with Andre Oorebeck as a voicing teacher he stressed this point very much. His teaching echoed much of what Doug wrote in his post earlier today... that one needs to push the limits of the instrument and its enviroment... get the widest possible tonal colour variance. One of the things Andre said time and time again was its very easy to create a <<beautiful>> tone that has no real power. For him... power was the name of the game. In any environment the response of the instrument is of course influenced by the acoustics of its surroundings... yet one can acheive (as Doug pointed out) a similiar (if not nearly identical) tonal response for finger input by appropriate voicing. I do not wonder that Eric Schandell, and John Patton have very similar styles. Eric learned much from John, at least thats what he tells me. I'm going to have the pleasure of working along side Eric on a limited basis soon as he is planning on moving to Norway soon. I look very much forward to this as he will be a fine instructor in the craft of voicing with lacqure. And despite my preferences for non lacquered hammers... I will value gaining skill and knowhow in this approach. That said... Steinway family folks are bound by <<the code>> as it were. And tho they are more like guidelines then an actual code... they do provide a certain coherency to Steinway handled instruments. There is at least one very great strength in this fact. That being that when one Steinway tech has to service a piano that another Steinway tech has handled for a while, there is a low probability of having to figure out what the heck the previous guy did. But back to voicing... This idea that fff play has to be limited by some notion of distortion is a very fleeting concept at best. The fact of the matter is that very very many folks like their fff screaming and downright nasty... and others ... well others dont. I find in the end like I think you are saying, that a piano that is too tamed may sound beautiful... especially for those melodic low level passages that rely heavily on some form of tonality in the composition being played... but simply dont have enough expressive power to deal with something like say Griegs piano concert in A minor. That opening line... and much of the more powerful passages simply require something far beyond <<pretty>> in my book. Tho to be sure... others will think differently... and more power to them. Point is... nobody is an idiot for their well considered opinions. It only gets idiotic when one begins to disdain others for theirs. Cheers RicB Hi Ric, others, At the same concert (original post) I mentioned to two Steinway techs in attendance that there seemed to be "no contrast of tone". (I won't mention their names). Both said the same thing... "That's right, and it's not really what we're after at Steinway". While there may be no "one way" to voice it's revealing to me that Eric S., Ron C., Scott J. and John P. have all voiced pianos I've listened to and they all are VERY similar. Vince is also of that school. John Patten and Eric both made the comment that all Steinway C&A techs pretty much do things the same way, or at least get to the same standard in tuning, voicing and regulation. Maybe I'm an idiot saying this but "pretty pianos" (like the rebuilds I mentioned at the convention) bore me after a while. I keep waiting for the ff sections to blow my hair back or move me emotionally, but they don't. Jim Busby BYU
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