Hi folks Just got back yesterday from a 4 day visit with Andre in Amsterdam where we exchanged a bit of experience and expertise. Andre is by far the finest voicing teacher I could ever have hoped to run into, and we had a great time working in his shop and enjoying each others company in the evening. He is a great cook too by the way. When I got there on Monday he had an older C3 set up and ready to go... nicely regulated... brand new Wurzen hammers by Renner, and he simply sat me down in front of it and told me to voice it for him.... and by and large he insisted on me doing nearly all the work, and making nearly all the decisions along the way. The object here was to create as beautiful and yet powerfull a sound as possible... to attempt a concert level voicing on a small C3, so there was no fooling around or cutting corners... no compromises allowed. We conversed a good deal along the way... comparing what each of us thought should be done next... and all the while he had this uncanny nack for prodding my ears to notice the slightest nuances in sounds. I was encouraged to try out my own sound ideas... (within reason of course) and he used any and all things I did to show me how one can correct for errors... or shift directions if one finds one has a change of heart along the way. I was struck several times during my stay there with the fact that so very very many a young technician starts off his / her career and many of these are individuals with talent and passion, and you just know they will spend their lives working on and learning about pianos..... and tragically they almost never get a chance to get this kind of training. I also was struck by the strongest of desires that I should have learned this stuff years ago. You can be a great tuner, but if you cant really build tone on the level these few can.... then you are quite limited actually to where you can go in your career.. and what you can do with what you know. But if you can build this kind of tone...... well life and work becomes far more interesting and enjoyable. Andre is a true master of tone building... make no mistake about it. I've heard the usual erten number of voicing classes, and guys who do classes, all the variants you can ask for.... but once in a while you run into a piano that quite obviously has been treated by somebody special. It speaks so obviously in testimony of that masters hands. Andre is one of these guys. I was really quite blown away with what he could show me... what he could do... what he knows, what he could pry out of me. And of top of all that... grin... he's one of the truly nice guys of our trade. Really hospitable, warm and genuinely freindly. Just wanted to publicly thank my freind for a wonderful time in Amsterdam Cheers RicB. By the way... this old C3 came out realllllly great. Some interesting notes for builders.... it had the early Yamaha version of the <<Steinway Tone Resonator>> or <<Bell>>... whatever you want to call it, a very prominant cutoff bar to limit the size of the soundboard quite a large bit.... and some strange beam bracing I've not noticed / encountered before.... evidently meant to stabilize the beams cross directionally... tho perhaps those in the know about such matters can offer a better purpose for these. This thing sounded really better...by a long shot.... then alot of new C3's I've run into lately.
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