AvantGrand

When do you, as a pianist, feel elation? Is it in that instant when you see a score for the first time, and feel the inspirations of the composer bloom inside your mind?

It might be when you're up on stage playing a grand piano that projects every aspect of your sound, bathed in a shower of applause from an appreciative audience.
Call it accomplishment, call it exultation - we're certain that you've experienced your share of such moments.
But above all, there is that incomparable joy you feel in those moments when you sit at your piano.
Those instants when, threading the fragments of your imagination together as sound, you become at one with the instrument; those treasured moments of delight for all who love the piano, regardless of their skill or experience.
It's why we believe that you can spend so much of your life in front of the piano.

At Yamaha, our desire is to craft pianos that bring a little more of this joy to as many people as possible.
This is a treasured ideal that we have long held dear and one we have now transformed into a new piano.
Meditating on those hours of happiness, those indescribable moments of joy experienced at a piano, we decided to do our best to respond to your desires and aspirations for this instrument.
AvantGrand. A new identity for the piano, born from the fusion of twenty-first century technology and more than a century of piano-crafting experience.
The blissful moment when you and the piano resonate as one.... is here.

To play when you want, how you want, as much as you want.
For those that love the piano, this is an extravagance above all else, something that all pianists yearn for.
In reality playing the piano brings with it many limits.
Beyond the physical issues of time to play and a place for the instrument, there are the fine nuances, particularly with the grand piano, of touch, tone, and reverberation, that contribute to the true thrill of playing the piano.

At Yamaha, we hope to offer the best sound we can to as many people as possible.
We have held this goal unchanged throughout our history of over a century of piano making.
Together with the know-how and inspiration gleaned from each new experience, along with the new technologies that have emerged over the years, this goal has taken us closer to our pictured ideal and seen with it the manufacture of a multitude of different pianos.
So what features does a piano have that make it essential in the lives of you, the people who possess both an unreserved love for playing the piano and an awareness of its essential excellence?

The AvantGrand emerged from our desire to relook at these elements.
We took the techniques we had cultivated making keyboards and pedals for acoustic pianos and combined them with the latest digital and acoustic technology, driven by the belief that the resulting instrument would be a model for how a piano should be in the modern age.
Innovation born from a thorough knowledge of the true soul of the piano, brought to the fore.
Everything you need, right in front of you.

Not creating a piano, but rediscovering one.
This, summed up in a single phrase, was the concept behind the development of the AvantGrand.
Making a so-called "acoustic" piano requires extensive technique and know-how, qualities accumulated through our many years of experience.
However, a major theme in the creation of the AvantGrand involved consciously refraining from relying on this experience.
Rather than designing from a standpoint of what a piano must be, we gave priority to looking at what it could be, searching for the kind of instrument that would suggest a new direction for the piano.

For Yamaha, with our history of over a century of piano crafting, it was digital technology that provided the impetus for such an outlook, giving us the confidence that we had matured enough as craftsmen to be able to give life to the ideals we had pictured in our minds.
In creating a digital piano that presented the piano as a more informal and enjoyable instrument, we had many expectations for its sound that had to be fufilled in the initial stages of development.
It is no exaggeration to say that digital technology evolves in the blink of an eye.
We felt that developing an instrument that took two major trends in the piano world to create a fusion, in the truest sense of the word, was a task that we simply had to complete.
Even with our history in making both digital and acoustic pianos, it was a feat that took everything that we at Yamaha knew to accomplish.

The AvantGrand is the crystallization of our hopes for the piano, something which cannot be summarized by simply calling it a hybrid of the digital and acoustic.
It was our superlative knowledge of the piano that supported this bold endeavor; that, and the bond we feel with you, with your enduring love for the piano.

The nuanced touch and response of the grand piano are an essential standard yardstick for piano quality. The AvantGrand offers the player a specially-developed grand piano action that features the same configuration as the action of a real grand. The hammers strike the "strings" from underneath, allowing minute adjustments to the weight distribution of the hammers, and to the movement of the hammers themselves, for a smoother feel when playing. In addition to a hammer sensor, the AvantGrand employs a non-contact key sensor that has no effect on the movement of the keys, affording excellent recognition of the player's pressure on the keyboard, timing, and the other delicate nuances that affect musical expression. This combination provides an impressive sensitivity for the entire range from pianissimo through to fortissimo, and the ability to translate even the swiftest trills of the pianist with transparency. The wood construction of the keyboard mirrors that of the grand piano, and features New Ivory II on the white keys. This is a unique new material developed by Yamaha, with a texture superbly close to that of natural ivory, allowing you to play swift passages with ease while also offering a sure response for slower pieces.

Light to the touch at first, subtle firmness partway through its travel, and lightening again as the player pushes further; the pedals of the grand piano have subtly different stages than can be felt when the pedal is depressed. Skilled players take advantage of these pedal movements by using extremely delicate pedaling that allows them to achieve finely nuanced expression in their play. In developing the AvantGrand, we set out to reproduce the sensations of a grand piano's pedals as faithfully as possible. The resulting pedal allows for music as you believe it should sound, equally responsive for more impressionistic pieces that require a lot of half-pedaling.

Together with a variety of piano sounds, the AvantGrand features samples of the actual vibrations from within the soundboard of the instrument. For the AvantGrand, we took an entirely new approach to our methods of sampling. To permit the sound to travel well to the player's position, as it does with a grand piano, we sampled the sound from four locations in the left, right, center, and rear of a grand piano.
Sampling from deeper inside the instrument, we were able reproduce the attraction of the original sound almost perfectly. It was the experience of our engineers, and a reiterative cycle of trial and error conducted with piano tuners that made this success possible. And of course, the samples in the AvantGrand are all taken from a specially-selected example of Yamaha's CFIIIS full concert grand piano.

Opening the lid of the AvantGrand reveals 4 speakers in an impressive and attractive layout.
The AvantGrand utilizes a four-channel multi-speaker system, designed in a three-way configuration with the bass woofer pointed down and the treble cones facing up, to allow more natural reverberation in the soundboard. Each of the speakers in this layout is equipped with its own dedicated amplifier, a luxury that reduces the interference in each pitch range and offers more natural expression to the delicate nuances in each sound. Moreover, by using speaker positioning that mimics the positions in the grand piano from which the original samples were taken, the AvantGrand offers a more natural sound to the pianist.

In addition to the four-channel multi-speakers, the AvantGrand also features a flat-panel "Soundboard Resonator" where the music stand would be when laid flat, allowing a more subtle reproduction of the buildup of sound felt by pianists when playing a grand piano. An oscillator called a "transducer" transmits vibration to the flat-panel soundboard, giving a realistic sound response that is especially evident in the higher range. (Only as for N3.)

The sound of an acoustic piano resonates throughout its entire body. The bass range in particular is an essential part of the reverberation that is continually transmitted to a player's body. In the AvantGrand, this is replicated by our newly-developed Tactile Response System (TRS) that focuses on reproducing reverberation. This system features two transducers in the soundboard, the area underneath the keyboard, resonating natural reverberation throughout the entire instrument. The player's hands on the keyboard transmit the natural sound felt from the feet as they depress the pedals; the epitome of real piano playing. This system can be turned on and off, and the vibration set to one of three levels.