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

It's fairly easy to understand how voicing can affect touch. For example, I assume you mean that voicing down your hammers will make the perception of touch slightly heavier. But IMO no one has so far explained how regulating can affect tone. Obviously regulating can affect touch but how does touch affect tone?

That's a fair question. My piano was way out when I regulated it sometime ago using, among other guides, Roger Jolly's Complete Grand Regulation. To my ear it improved the tone.

I am no authority but Roger Jolly says, "Setting what we call let-off at its best place is crucial to allow the pianist to use every shade of tone and every bit of power the instrument can produce."

Sauter uprights have a gorgeous tone, thier grands as well so do Fazioli.

To me that quote sounds like what he suggests allows greater control of the tone which I wouldn't equate with changing the tone.

I think it can change the way the hammers attack. Makes sense if you think about the physics, if the hammers have a greater distance to move, you get more momentum and a brighter sound. I definitely noticed that I am responding to the touch/sound (I'm now finally believing my tech that they are intertwined) by playing differently.

I could have sworn that my tech had voiced a couple of times and he said nope, just continued to improve the regulation.

I think what determines the quality and loudness of the tone is the speed of the hammer on impact and nothing else. So I'm not at all sure what you say is correct. IOW if one plays at the same dynamic level(same hammer speed at impact) I don't think the tone would change even if the hammer traveled a different distance. If one plays at a louder dynamic level then the tone on most good pianos get dsomewhat brighter but that's not comparing apples to apples.

If the piano is out of regulation and the piano's hammers are not striking the strings properly then fixing that could, I assume. improve the tone. But I think the topic is really about taking a piano that's properly regulated and somehow adjusting the regulation and thereby changing the tone.

Here is a old link to someone who bought a Sauter at a bargain price in Australia.About 15 posts down a there is a cell phone recording of the tone of the Sauter.It not only demonstrates what I think is the usual tone of a Sauter upright but how a good tall grand can sound like a small, and in some cases a medium sized grand.
If you listen about 1/3 or a 1/4 way through, you can hear someone playing the beautiful slow movement of a Chopin concerto
https://forum.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/1501555/2.html

I'm instinctively in the camp that finds it hard to believe that Angela Hewitt's Fazioli would get no voicing over a period years difficult to believe. As much as she plays, I would assume that without attention it would brighten. Of course, I could be wrong.

So, I'm curious if it's said somewhere explicitly that it's never been voiced? Or is that an assumption because it's not mentioned anywhere?

The tone of a piano depends not only on the tone of each note but also on how notes sound when played together. Soundboards do not have an even response to each note played at the same speed. Concert technicians have to deal with that somehow. They talk about cycles of regulation, tuning and voicing.

It's already been established that it got extensive voicing at the factory so any claim that it hadn't been voiced seems to make little sense even if her tech didn't voice it after she owned it( which I agree is highly unlikely). And even if the piano didn't brighten that doesn't mean a major artist wouldn't want her tech to do some voicing on the piano to even out or adjust the tone.

The Fazioli in question was brought into Singapore for Angela Hewitt to play. In his posts Wzkit1 says the dealer has not voiced it since then. His point is that the tone of the piano had improved in the year since he first played it.

Talking about hammer speed at impact, that reminds me of something I've wondered about. If the speed impacts tone, then tone and volume would seem to inextricably linked. But then I wonder how a better pianist is able to extract a variety of tonal colors. So then I wonder if, for example, acceleration may factor into the equation too. That may sound odd, since to a large extent the hammer is accelerating from stopped until it hits the string, in a very short range, but the acceleration is not necessarily linear. The hammers can move from stopped to maximum speed almost instantly (smash them), or they can start moving relatively slowly, but with increased pressure, making the acceleration more progressive. In other words, the hammer could contact the string (1) while traveling at a relatively constant speed, (2) at the same speed but while accelerating, or even (3) at the same speed while decelerating. Given the space, and controls, these are necessarily very slight differences, but could certainly be distinguished behaviors that very advanced pianists do subconsciously.

Anyway, just some thoughts conjecture on how various colors might be produced.

Right or wrong, I'd be curious to hear how advanced pianists produce more colors.

Errata, obviously I meant a good tall upright can sound like a small or even a medium sized grand. People often say ALL 130 uprights sound this way.That is not true.

Try this. Painters mix colours to achieve tones. Pianists mix tones to achieve colours.

Some higher end DPs now calculate acceleration as part of the tone generation too. I don't know WHAT they do if they detect x acceleration, but my guess is that DPs measure velocity at some point(s) prior to the termination of hammer travel. Because of that, acceleration actually impacts the final velocity at the time of strike. So it makes sense that the acceleration value may be used to modify the the final strike velocity at the point of hammer impact (and perhaps the timing of the hammer delay setting) but that there isn't anything like a separate sample or filter/affect applied to "accelerating" versus "decelerating" hammer strike. I think in the end, the terminal velocity at instant of strike is the only value that ultimately matters.

To Retsacnal's conjecture, my wandering mind wonders whether the acceleration may matter if the hammer felt isn't perfectly compacted (IOW, there isn't truly a single "point" in the hammer's strike, but rather a "range," at which point acceleration value may very well affect the tone)?

I think speed affects volume and volume affects tone on a good piano(louder volume produces a brighter tone).

In terms of different colors, on a single note played and held I think a pianist can only affect volume i.e. they cannot change tonal color without changing volume. But since music is more complex than a single note good pianists create different colors by their voicing, articulation, pedaling, etc.

Fast repeated notes have a different timbre to slow repeated notes.

Yeah but that speed could change depending on the regulation. Whatever the case, I thought my tech had voiced when he hadn't, and my piano sounded sweeter after regulation.

On the mechanics, escapement means the hammer is in free flight when it hits the strings. Decelerating in fact, but the strings would not "know" that.

A note can be stronger or weaker than its neighbour. Hammers travelling at the same speed produce different volumes from adjacent notes (due to non linear response of the soundboard and the piano). Technicians probably make small adjustments for that.

In other words, what twocats has just said.