From Piannaman@aol.com
Andre,
Good to see you post here again! Your presence and wealth of information
was truly missed!
Dave S.
In a message dated 12/1/2005 7:55:01 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
antares@euronet.nl writes:
On 29-nov-2005, at 19:31, St?phane Collin wrote:
Yahoo ! Andr? !
Long time no see.
Great to read you again here.
And you St?phane!
Now, if, yes, this is all a matter of taste, as stated by others, what I
would find interesting is to sort out what is a matter of taste from what is
obviously faulty. Difficult, but certainly important to master. Any ideas ?
Best regards.
St?phane Collin.
Let me put it this way (since you ask me) :
It is maybe better to simplify things in the first place, because this whole
thing about voicing is so abstract.
We have a piano A, consisting of a soundboard, a wooden frame, an iron
frame, a bunch of strings, a keyboard and an action.
All this combined will give a specific kind of sound, totally different from
piano B. which was built in a slightly different way.
So Piano A and B have different personalities and both these different
personalities may have different characters.
When we hit a string of piano A, with an unvoiced hammer, the outcome will
be condensed and the hardness and shrillness predictable because of the high
overtones being activated by a stone hard hammer (assuming the unvoiced hammer
is stone hard). Nevertheless, it will already be possible to distinguish a
trace of a personality, hidden and masked by the 'voice', the hammer.
The same of course for piano B.
Now what we do with voicing the hammers, is sort of playing with the
possibilities the personality of the piano and its hammer gives us.
Playing with the hammer is in an way limited, because we have only a number
of possibilities here :
we can leave it the way it is
we can give it a small cushion
we can give it a big cushion
we can give it a hard crown, combined with a small cushion
we can give it a mellow crown, combined with a big cushion
we can give it a limited battery voicing, combined with the above
we can give it a huge battery voicing, combined with the above
we can give it a tulip shape, combined with the above
we can give it an egg shape, combined with the above
we can give it a diamond shape, combined with the above
There are more things we can do, but I think this is enough as an example.
Anyway, what I am trying to say, is that we will always be able to
distinguish the personality, but this personality can be masked with quite a number of
personae.
That's why I mentioned before :
To give a piano a voice is one thing,
What kind of voice is another.
EAR
friendly greetings
from
Andr? Oorebeek
R. Vinkeleskade 1-3hg
1071 SN Amsterdam
The Netherlands
tel/fax : 0031-20-6237357
gsm : 0031-645-492389
Dave Stahl
Dave Stahl Piano Service
650-224-3560
_http://www.dstahlpiano.net/_ (http://www.dstahlpiano.net/)