Piano Video Lesson: Understanding Piano Voicing: Warm vs. Bright

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin here with a question a lot of people are wondering about and it's a hard thing to even grasp.

What is better, warm or bright voicing on your piano? Now you may have heard these terms and you wonder what they even mean or what voicing is on the piano so let's start with that.

Now there's much that is involved in voicing of a piano. The voicing is the tone of the piano and when you consider that there are 88 hammers, each one of them has to be individually voiced. Essentially is the hardness or softness of the hammers that is the fundamental thing about voicing. Now there's more to it than that, there's the exact shaping of the hammer, there's the alignment of the hammer, the strike point, there's a lot to it and the regulation also adds to the voicing of the piano to some extent but the most intrinsic part is how hard the hammers are or how soft they are. Now some hammers naturally are harder than other hammers. For example, some hammers need to be lacquered in order to get them harder. Other hammers need to be needled to make them softer so a piano might be brand new on the showroom floor and be really dull sounding in which case it needs to be voiced up or brighter. Another piano might be the opposite problem that might have very hard hammers, have a brittle, harsh tone.

So there's a lot to the question about which is better and I'm going to break it down even further for you. Let's start with the room the piano is in. Let's say you're in a small room that's very bright like for example you clap your hands like that and it's a cacophonous sound, it almost hurts your ears just and someone talking it's kind of an echo chamber and a bright piano in a room like that can really be harsh to your ears, it can even hurt. So you might want to have a warmer, softer hammers so that it's not so harsh.

A larger room on the other hand you want to fill the room with lots of sound, maybe your piano isn't that large for the space so maybe a brighter tone can carry the tone further.

But there's much more to it than this. The style of music you play may enter into it. For example, I've got a friend who loves playing rock piano and for him the brighter the better. You can't have it too bright, you just want it to cut through and have that honky tonk sound and then there are others who really like a warm mellow sound, maybe a new age player is looking to create sonorities of warmth and soothing qualities of tone. So another thing that enters into this is the power of the player. A very powerful player wants to take advantage of the big range of tone on the instrument and might not want it to be voiced too bright because then they can't expend all their energy and be able to open up the sound and get all the different levels of tone. Where somebody doesn't have that kind of power, they might struggle to get a forte, much less a fortissimo and having a piano that's brighter that they just don't have to push so hard to get the tone out is going to be a much better fit for that player.

Now here's a really interesting thing is the piano itself will either lend itself to a brighter tone or a warmer tone.

Now there are some certain classifications of pianos, you think of American pianos like Steinway and Mason and Hamlin as having a warmer tone than let's say a Duesendorfer or a Faziolli with a brighter tone and there is some truth to that. But the real truth is that any piano can be voiced brighter or more mellow so why would you choose to do one or the other? Well here at Living Pianos we try to voice the piano so that it has a very wide range so that if you play really strong it'll open up and won't get harsh.

There's a second reason for that which is the more a piano is played the brighter it gets all by itself just from playing it. This is due to the fact that the strings will make the indentations in the felt and that compacted felt is harder. If you look inside your piano at the hammers you'll see little grooves where they hit the strings. As those grooves get deeper the tone gets brighter and it can get offensively bright in which case the hammers could be reshaped by gently filing getting back down to the egg shape because they might actually get kind of squared off on the top where it's impacted the strings so much.

And once again needling to the rescue. So having a piano that's voiced on the warmer side is actually kind of a smart thing because it's going to get brighter anyway and let's hope it doesn't get too bright. You could always mitigate that. Now if you have a piano that's as I said you're just struggling to get any sound out of it you know go ahead and have your technician and make sure your piano technician is skilled in voicing. It is a rare talent for every tuner somebody who is a piano tuner the number who can actually do fine voicing is very limited. Look for somebody who does a concert level work. You know if you have some a local symphony and you find out who tunes the piano for the visiting artists who play concertos with the orchestra that's who you want to get to do voicing in your piano. Somebody else could actually do far more damage than good if they do the wrong type of voicing. And the voicing by the way isn't an absolute like oh it's going to be bright now it's going to be warm. No first of all it's got to be even from key to key which is a real challenge and like one definition of infinity you can go on and on and on getting closer and closer you never reach it but get as close as you possibly can. But the other aspect which is so important and interesting is that you can voice different sections of the piano differently.

For example I prefer a piano that has a warmer tone in the middle and gets a little bit brighter on top and a little bit brighter on the bottom so you get that nice rich bass and the nice singing treble on the top octave that doesn't last that long anyway and it's a very very appealing sound. That's a personal preference and we voice our pianos that way because it sounds good you know when you're playing and you want to bring out that nice bright treble and the bass with a little bit more brilliance because it's just the smallest Steinway so you're not going to get the kind of thunderous bass of some of our nine foot pianos we have downstairs.

So one last point and I talk about the power of the player and I have a personal story to reveal. My father Mort Nestrin was an incredibly powerful pianist but he also had great control over pianissimo playing and he really loved to exploit that range of a piano and I remember going with him to the Baldwin showroom in New York City, he was a Baldwin artist, and he'd go to the back room where they had all the concert grants to try for his New York recitals or his recordings he'd be trying out and he'd go to one piano and go ah this is the one because it was a little bit warmer and he knew that he could really let loose and never have the fear of having a harsh sound. So he always went for the piano that had the warmest voicing and he was really happy with that because he could get those really gorgeous delicate tones and yet if he opened up and really put more and more power in it would just keep opening up with different colors of sound.

Now to contrast that, Vladimir Horowitz had a piano that was really doctored to be super bright usually, now there are some exceptions, if you listen to his recordings they're not all that way, his Chrysleriana of Schumann, that particular recording just comes to mind as one that has a very rich warm sound but listen to his like you know some of his transcriptions like Stars and Stripes or his pictures at an exhibition, oh my gosh those pianos are like nails just absolute so brilliant like metal you know to metal and yet under the fingers of Horowitz he had a control that was unreal. It also by the way as a little side note his piano had a shallower key depth so he didn't have to push keys as far down in order to make the tone so his brilliance, technical brilliance was being able to play so lightly that he could control this instrument with a shallow key travel and an explosive sound so he could play and get the nuance of tone and get the pianissimo, how he could control that is beyond belief and that when he wanted power all he had to do was put a little energy in and he had that explosive power that could flare up at any moment and there was a fire to his playing because of the control he had over his unusually voiced and regulated piano.

I hope this is interesting for you and if you have any questions about your piano and any unique challenges you face put them here in the comments at livingpianos.com. After all we are your online piano store. Thanks a lot for joining me again I'm Robert Estrin, we'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/understanding-piano-voicing-warm-vs-bright/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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