Low Inertia

[jimialeggio5 at comcast.net]

>From what your discribing I'm wondering if 
>you've played a lot of digital keyboards and if you like them. I have, which 
>is why I ask. Sounds like that may be a little of where your coming from. Or 
>not.
>Fenton

This is a very interesting question.

As I was trying to specify what it was I was looking for both sound and 
touch-wise, an electric piano really focused my attention on the nature of piano 
sound...not so much touch...

I don't pay too much attention to touch on an electric because there is such a 
small range of sound to control. Its got other tricks, but nuance of sound 
quality isn't one of them.  I see touch as the mechanism to control varying 
sound attacks and qualities. Since the electric has a limited palette I don't 
consider its touch as a control mechanism.  

But I had a really interesting experience with an electric.

I sat down at an electric keyboard to play some Bach because someone else was 
hogging the piano I wanted to use. I normally avoid electrics because they have 
no ability to be percussive. However, Bach doesn't fall apart without 
percussive-ness.
As I played some 3 voice pieces each of the voices sung out so independently it 
really blew me away. I had been trying find that independence of voice leading 
on the pianos at my disposal, and it just was not singing the way I knew it 
should.  Then the hogged  piano became available. So I immediately sat down at 
it ( the piano) and tried the same pieces...the voice independence disappeared. 
I spent the rest of the evening going back and forth between the two, trying to 
nail down what was allowing or disallowing the voice leading.  The whole 
experiment really blew me away.

I realized that although the electric lacked all kinds of things that I want to 
hear, it also lacked the millisecond of noise, ie undifferentiated sound, that 
follows every strike of the hammer. Voice leading happens when different musical 
lines have different tonal characters, different register locations, and 
different articulations.  Sometimes with a piano, since every single note begins 
with 
such a quantity undifferentiated noise, the differentiation between the voices 
was 
masked, since all tones start with noise. When the fundamental finally appeared, 
the musical line it belonged 
to was no longer obvious. 

What this got to with actions?  I also realized after finding a couple of pianos 
where that initial millisecond of noise was there but minimized, that I could 
get that voice leading singing out all on its own again, and have the percussive 
quality that the piano possesses. Even though the action was heavier than I 
like, the respone of the belly allowed me to play to the bottom of the key 
without cringing at the initial racket, so the action although not my favorite, 
wasn't shutting me down. 

I find the interactive nature of the various piano systems striking.
--
Jim Ialeggio 
www.grandpianosolutions.com (under construction)
Shirley, MA (978) 425-9026