Yamaha Soundboard Wood

[Farrell]

I went to my son's piano recital at the new local Yamaha dealer yesterday. Being that I will be laying out boards to make up my first soundboard panel in the next few weeks, I was drawn to inspect this sampling of new Yamaha soundboards.

I was shocked. With fair consistency, the lower grade Yamy grands, i.e. GH1, etc., had panel pieces with as few as 5 annular rings per inch! It appeared that the ring angle was far from 90 degrees also (but of course difficult to see exactly). Such a piece would have a neighbor with a very high ring density. Colors were all over the place also (not that I think color means a hoot, except for marketing purposes). They had a couple C7s there also. These boards were pure creamy white with very even moderate ring densities. I was not so surprised that they would choose to put nice wood in the nice piano, but rather that they used such a lower grade spruce in their entry-level grands.

>From a resource preservation standpoint, this is likely a very good thing! I suspect upgrading the wood on these little pianos would make little difference to the musical potential of these pianos, and even less to the folks that would buy them.

Terry Farrell