Warm vs. Bright Pianos: What's the difference?

hi there this is max with family piano co and today i want to talk about the difference between bright and warm pianos um so when you're going piano shopping um one common question that you might get asked is do you prefer a brighter sound or a warmer sound and a lot of people might have some foggy idea of the difference between the two but today i really want to talk about you know the difference between the two and what it can do for you musically and which you might prefer um so this piano here is a kohler and campbell a kc 118 from 1990 um every piano i'm going to show today is going to be kind of a similar build of piano to just leave out you know different variables to just focus in on the sound and what you can get out of it this is going to be a pretty bright piano now what does that mean i'm going to play something real quick here [Applause] now this is a bright piano meaning each tone is pretty intensely focused um some words that you might hear about bright pianos are lively focused intense clear um crystal clear um lively natural some characteristics here is on a bright piano the attack the way the note the sound begins is gonna be pretty sharp pretty sudden [Music] this makes the sound really right at your fingertips provides a lot of clarity um you know and so i'm going to go ahead and play this is a bach piece here because one big effect of a bright piano is you can hear what's going on in the different regions of the piano very cleanly and in this piece there's going to be different melodies happening in different parts of the keyboard a lot a lot of things going on and you should be able to hear it really nice and clean as well there's going to be a lot of sharp articulations like these kind of quick sharp staccatos will come out very lively very articulative because the attack is going to be sharper and also the cut off of the notes is going to be cleaner on a bright piano so this is some bach [Music] so there's going to be a lot of vividness to the sound you know a nice intensity to the sound um everything is going to come across really nice and clean on a good bright piano and it's really good for learning because you can really hear everything that you're doing very cleanly and the base range you know clarity is always a very important thing you don't want your sound to be muddy a bright piano is going to be easy to distinguish the tones on [Music] your mid-range is going to be very strong and projective kind of front loaded in terms of a sharp attack [Music] there's also a bit of a you can say and it depends on the piano a slightly metallic or slightly twangy sound to a bright piano and of course that depends on the piano itself some of them will be very pure some of them will have more of a percussive twing but it really gives character to the sound [Music] there's also going to be more uniqueness um to the character of each of the different registers really what uh lends well to um you know counterpoint playing like with bach or like with jazz when you have different textures going on [Music] when you want something really clean sounding a drier sound is another sound you'll have associated with bright pianos like this um so if you're a jazz player if you're playing something punchy if you love playing baroque music or even if you love playing you know romantic music or anything but you really value clarity of sound um and a more texture detailed kind of sound the bright piano is probably going to be right for you i'm not going to head over to a warm piano play the same box piece and talk about you know the advantages of a warm piano all right and here we are at the kauai st1 um this is a new piano um brand new and it is an institutional piano in satin ebony and i'm demonstrating it as our warm piano and so i want to go ahead and play the back piece for you here now in general on a warmer piano you're going to have you know a lot more of a mellow soulful kind of tone [Music] in general i talked about how on the brighter piano each area of the piano has a pretty unique character to it on a warmer piano generally it's going to be better blended together and sound more similar across the piano so if you're playing you know something with chords in the left hand melody line in the right hand they're going to blend together very very well um and give you a really worn lush sound with expansive wide tones um so i'm gonna play the box here some things that you'll notice are the articulations like the staccatos there's going to be a difference in how they sound they're going to come off more grounded a little more gentle it's not as sharp of a clash is on a bright piano um and then the way the sound dissipates at the end is a it's a longer tail to the dissipation of the sound it takes a longer time and there's more bleed over in terms of one sound into the next this is really good for legato playing to make it sound really smooth really natural and gentle um but it's going to come out with staccato playing just a little less vivid but you have more room in terms of what you can do expression wise on a warm piano [Music] so [Music] so where a bright piano will give you more freedom of expression at the high dynamics of the loud dynamics a warm piano will generally give you more nuance and detail in the softer dynamics [Music] so if you really like playing with an ethereal quality you know spiritual kinds of music uh soulful kinds of music gentle lyrical a warmer piano is going to give you more of the creative uh palette that you would like to have so some other differences because the tones themselves are wider now your sounds your tones themselves are going to be really rich and full of color especially down in the base here big booming resonating um but one difference is because the tones are really wide um there's going to be a little bit less clarity overall and you can still distinguish your tones um they're just gonna because they dissipate slower and are wider in nature they're gonna kind of blend into each other a little more [Music] more of a glow surrounding the central sound um now your mid-range is going to be you know really full but overall much gentler in nature than a bright piano your upper range is not going to be quite as sparkling or you can even say in a negative way piercing depending on the specific piano it's going to be more mellow but a lot fuller tone [Music] again a lot easier to express yourself at these low dynamics on a worn piano on a bright piano it's easier to express yourself consistently at high dynamics [Music] all right now i'm gonna go ahead and open up this piano here and show you you know what goes into making the piano sound and talk about what you can and can't change in terms of the piano sound all right so here we have our st1 opened up for you to see and i want to talk about what gives a piano its sound and so there are some parts of that that are going to be unchangeable inherent to the instrument itself and then there are going to be parts of it that you can customize and you can change so there that's one nice thing with an acoustic piano is um you can change the sound of the piano through voicing and get it closer to how you want it um but there's also a lot that's inherent to the piano itself so you there's a good amount of freedom to change the sound so if the piano that you're looking at is pretty close to what you like you can almost certainly get it to exactly how you want but if it's drastically different than what you would like sound wise but you just really love the touch of it um you can get close to where you want to be but a big part of that's going to be kind of baked into the piano so why would it be baked into the piano well there are several parts of the piano that a technician just can't change at least not in a practical way one is going to be the sound board on a good quality piano it's going to be a solid spruce sound board and this is your kind of sound production component so hammers strike the strings and then all the sound energy gets focused through the sound board and that that's what coats the sound with tone with life and every sound board is going to be unique because they're all from you know separate organic materials um so a solid spruce sound board you know it's it's gonna be okay how old was the tree that it cut down from where was the tree grown every every one of these things is going to change the sound a little bit so if we had 10 st1's you know all along this row here each one of them would sound slightly different because the exact sound board is different now another thing that changes the piano is going to be the overall cabinet design and especially how strong and rigid the piano is you'll see on this st1 a lot of really thick strong back posts in general the stronger and more rigid the piano is more of the energy that you feed into the piano think of it like a machine the more energy that you feed into the piano can be projected as tone why because the stronger more rigid a piano is the less energy is being lost due to inefficiency so the more efficient the more strong and rigid a piano is the better it can project its tone now some other things that you can't really change on the piano is going to be the scale design and i'm not a technician so to describe it in a pretty simple way the scale design is you know exactly how the different string lengths of the piano because you go from shorter strings here to the longest strings over here so exactly how that gradient of different lengths is kind of laid out the geometry of it is going to be your scale design along with the diameters of the strings which will be different on different brands of pianos just the way that they do it it's going to be unique to each brand in different time periods of piano and that all has to do with the effect of the sound as well as the exact materials and ways that the strings are made now the strings you can change your strings on a piano in fact the first 40 50 years that you have the strings is considered when they're at their freshest newest over time a process called oxidation which is when these strings start to interact with the oxygen in the air like any metal does over many decades it will begin to brighten up the sound right now brand new strings are going to be you know this is copper it's going to be really beautiful really radiant color over time it begins to become more dull both in sound and visually the look of the strings you can change the strings on a piano and it's recommended if you want the healthiest freshest sound to do that every 40ish years or so but that's going to be an integral part of the sound and a lot of times if you're looking at used instruments unless they're like a higher end upright they're probably going to have the original strings and that's because it tends to run about 3 000 or so to restring an upright piano now the other thing that affects the sound of course sound is produced when the hammer strikes the string so the two big things are going to be the density of the hammer felts and the shape of the hammer themselves now on a brand new piano the density has not been changed from years of hitting against the strings the shape has not been changed so generally newer pianos are going to be kind of at their warmest the strings have not yet aged the hammer felts are exactly the shape that they're intended to be and nice and soft now technicians can change that and this would be a common step in a refurbishment process is reshaping your hammer felts to get them back to that original shape as closely as possible you can also alter the shape to make the piano warmer and then changing the density because years of compacting against the strings is going to harden up the felt and a technician can change that for you and soften the piano so i would say you know they can change the sound nature maybe 30 of the way or so so let's say you know your piano is 8 out of 10 in terms of brightness that's a pretty pretty bright piano with some solid voicing they could probably bring it to a 5 or so like right in the middle um but you want to be able to change it from you know a very bright piano to while this is one of the most mellow pianos i play that won't necessarily work but that that just goes into the different components that makes a piano sound what you can change and what you cannot change so if you find a piano that you really like the sound of but you kind of wish it was tweaked a little bit either warmer or brighter well that can be accomplished for you don't worry about that at that point i would be worrying about you know do i like the touch of the piano all right and now i'm going to play two more examples of particularly bright and warm pianos for you guys to hear the difference all right so here we have a summer institutional piano now this was made in america in 1969 um and this is going to be another one of our brighter pianos that i want to show um as well as i'm going to show this kauai ust8 over here from 1990 as an example of a really mellow kind of piano um if i talked about on a brighter piano you're going to have a more percussive sound you're going to have a sharper attack so if you're playing something kind of jumpier or bouncier [Music] it's gonna come across really well now on this particular piano i would say this is one piano that brightened up over the ages but it still retains some of its original character you can tell you know by the glow of the sound this was a warmer piano when it was uh new as well as listen to the way on an aged piano and a brighter piano the different characters of the different uh registers of the piano here you have deep blooming brightening up as you go up the piano really nice multi-dimensional effect because you're gonna have a different core character to the sound at the different parts of the piano the attack is sharper so you know your more jumpy bouncy staccato cords i'm gonna play really cleanly with a nice cut off in general these institutional pianos they're going to be designed to be at least somewhat bright they don't tend to be extremely warm um because as an institutional piano you know one they're going for a versatile kind of in the middle between warm and bright kind of sound over the years it will get brighter um but especially when you want to have clarity brightness gives you a lot of clarity and institutional pianos is kind of designed for you know a practice room or a teaching studio environment where that clarity is going to be a really big deal so different sounds more uniqueness to the sound overall which is both the function of the age of the piano but also the brighter nature of the piano now i'm going to show the kauai over here now this kauai ust8 it's definitely on the warm mellow side it is about 30 years old um so it will have just began to have the first elements of that aging process on the strings happen but in general you can tell it's very nice and warm velvety each tone is really wide the sound is very gentle and the different areas of the keyboard are more similar to each other so they blend together real well in general warmer instruments you have more control of the quiet dynamics [Music] but you're uh harsher or sorry sharper articulations going to be a little less defined because the cutoff time is longer the notes kind of hang in the air there's more of a tonal glow to the sound that carries over still a good amount of clarity it's just not going to be quite as vivid as on a brighter piano but if you're playing soulful music [Music] and a bright piano like this is going to be just breathtakingly beautiful so there there's a lot of different words that you are going to hear associated with bright pianos and warm pianos um essentially it is pretty subjective um it's kind of like trying to describe colors through words like if you're trying to describe the color red to someone without you know saying the word red it's you can kind of come up with a good approximation some uh you know some pretty good reference points um but you're not going to get the exact nature of the sound it's kind of what it is when we describe a piano sound we're looking for kind of the closest approximations that we can get through vocabulary but it's an abstract thing so bright pianos will be radiant percussive could consider them more brassy precise very clean where warm instruments are going to be full bodied lush rich and gentle harmonious soulful a lot of different words you can use to describe it and these are just kind of the ends of the spectrum warm bright there's a lot of room in the middle there's pianos that will have certain characteristics of bright pianos and certain characteristics of warm you know everything you know can fall somewhere in between the spectrum and there's a lot of different words that are going to be used so in general it's just good to go into the shopping experience having a little more familiarity between a worn piano and a bright piano and start to be thinking about all right um what kind of suits my personal playing style better um what do i like more um and then keep in mind that you can voice the piano and you can change its tone it won't be a drastic you know 180 on the character the piano um but there's a lot that you can do to make the piano the way that you like so overall let me know if you have any more questions about warm or bright pianos or just any piano related questions in general you know i'm happy to help out however i can thank you very much for watching

Channel: Family Piano Co

Views: 19,701

Keywords:

Id: KMd7wD_YpR4

Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022