I’ve been involved in a series of performances using the Yamaha N3 AvantGrand. The AvantGrand series are hybrid pianos in that the keyboard, action and pedal work is all identical to that found on an acoustic piano. But the tone generation uses large digital samples of a high quality grand piano projected by built-in amplification and […]
Yamaha
Saying Goodbye
I said goodbye to a friend recently. While with Yamaha in the 90’s I purchased a Yamaha concert grand…a CFIII 51GX to be precise. GX designates an experimental model and 51 designates the series. The 51 was a design experiment that incorporated a number of design features of a popular concert grand made by a […]
Maybe the Times are a-changing…
Frederic Chiu played the new Yamaha CFX concert grand in a well received recital at the Metropolitian Museum of Art in New York. The extremely positive review in the New York Times also featured something that has been very rare in the past, a photo that included the name of a non-New York based piano […]
2010 NAMM part 1 – Overview
NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) is the big musical instrument industry trade show. Technically it’s held twice a year, but the big show is every January in Anaheim, California. Anybody and everybody connected with the musical products industry shows and attends NAMM. This includes pianos of all price points, drums, brass and wind instruments, […]
2010 NAMM part 3 Yamaha CFX
Yamaha has had a high end “craft built” line for a number of years and has been a very serious builder of concert pianos for decades. The concert grand, the CFIII (CF3) has undergone a number of iterations and experiments, resulting in the model CFIIIS that has been the flagship for the last 8 years […]
2010 NAMM part 4 – Bösendorfer and Yamaha
So now you have a major Japanese piano maker with a proven high end approach owning and taking marketing and sales responsibility for a 180 year old Austrian maker of what is generally referred to as one of the worlds finest craft built pianos; what happens next? My prediction is that good things will […]