Duvets

[Gooday]

I've had a yamaha B1 for a while now. It lives in a very small room and is tuned regularly. I've grown to really dislike the harsh tone from the middle of the keyboard down, perhaps something you'd expect as I've become accustomed to Kawai RX3s, a concert Steinway and Yamaha C3s (from renting practice rooms, trying out pianos in shops or in evening classes.)

I've had the piano voiced, which helped a bit, but has also lead to a more uneven touch somehow. I can't fit a bigger piano up the stairs or through a window, so I'd just resigned myself to playing with the practice pedal down for most of the 6 months between tuning. Until I move house, whenever that happens.

However, yesterday in a fit of desperation, I stuffed a duvet between the wall and the back of the B1. What a transformation.
I can now live with the bass and middle range which is less harsh and the treble, which has always been surprisingly good, is now very good.

Maybe the piano was too loud for the room. Net result - I don't need to use the practice pedal and can start to sort out my touch which has been suffering. Volume is reduced almost as much as with practice pedal, but with much better influence over dynamics.

Looks awful of course, but ...

Anyone else tried this?

[Barrie Heaton]

Then you need to tell you tuner to voice down big time

Voicing should have no effect on playing, unless when the tuner took the action out they did not seat it back correctly.


Barrie,

[markymark]

I find my piano is also very loud (a P121) for our livingroom, so much so that I have had to play with the damper pedal down. I'm reluctant to ask my tuner to "voice it down" in case he does it too much and voicing it up, I have heard, is harder.

Incidentally, I have found that even with the damper pedal down, not much difference is detected in the volume or tone.

[Barrie Heaton]

Some foam rubber cut to the width of the gaps of the bracing's at the back of the piano. You will need it about 6 " to 8" think or layered  push it  onto the soundboard that will kill the volume, the more you push it on to the soundboard the more you will kill the volume.

However, if you have no distinction when the damper pedal is down the piano need voicing far too bright for the room. You get this in practise rooms with U3s in schools and cols


Barrie,

[crispin]

We had problems with unisons going out after a very short time so that each note had beats and the tone became really awful. An expert (the manager of a very fancy piano store) came to inspect the problem ... and declared that it was a voicing problem. He proceeded to voice selected notes .. and continued to voice these selected notes ... and then declared the problem fixed. It was terrible ... the touch was completely uneven ... and these notes were completely overvoiced... and this expert never retuned the offending unisons...
It took weeks of playing to recover somewhat from this terrible experience... and really the piano never fully recovered from this treatment.

I am sure that expert voicers can really improve the tone of a piano ... but I will never let anyone voice a piano I own unless I have really first class references about his work...

I like this foam rubber solution offered by Barrie

[vernon]

Unisons going out and voicing have no connection whatsoever as disciplines.
The former is technical,the latter is folklore