… hot sauce dripping from their toes….slurp…
I am reminded about this much more preferable wording to the original (which I’m sure everyone reading this will recognise) when I was playing with my son at his youth group’s Christmas party this afternoon. Our combination of saxophone (he played tenor this time) and keyboard (the new Kurzweil) worked very well, and a number of his friends also helped us to play, which was good. I would have preferred playing the Stuart, but then again, as I’ve said before, portability is an issue and in any case I can’t fit the Stuart into my car.
I can fit the maker into my car, however, and that’s what I did when Wayne and I had lunch together yesterday in Newcastle when I was finally able to find to time to visit. We discussed a range of issues as we normally do, but from my perspective I was able to try out two new 2.9 metre grand pianos which have only recently been completed. Indeed one was so new it hadn’t had its final tuning and voicing yet – but nonetheless it sounded extraordinarily good. It had a somewhat softer tone than the other one but this is probably a voicing issue and a result of softer hammers.
The interesting thing was that as I played these pianos, with pieces of music that I was quite comfortable with on my piano, that once again I found myself playing them differently, needing to allow for a much ‘wetter’ (= more reverberation) sound and also, believe it or not, longer sustain than even my piano has. Later in the afternoon Wayne was visited by two local music teachers who were interested in the pianos (although as it turned out not to buy one, although undoubtedly if they could they would have done) and after a cook’s tour of the manufacturing facility he and I spent well over an hour with them demonstrating the qualities and sounds that these pianos could produce. It really was an eye-opening experience for them, because I’m sure that although they obviously had heard of the pianos, they certainly had no idea about the ‘whys and wherefores’ of the instrument.
This raises an interesting point. Giving that the major source of information concerning these pianos is the website, I get the distinct view that the kind of information Wayne and I imparted that afternoon is just not available either there or anywhere else.
So it’s a new piano. So it’s a new sound. So what? What can we do with it? What does it mean?
This is the information that people need to help them decide whether a Stuart piano is the one for them. If they can’t physically play one (if they are overseas for example) we have to give them the next best thing – a virtual tour of the piano that allows them to see what Wayne and I were able to show these ladies.
That is a concern for me, because it does appear as though the message is not getting out the way it should and certainly not getting to the right people.