Posts from — January 2009

A piano is a mighty instrument, with even the smallest spinets weighing a few hundred pounds, large uprights and grands coming in at over a thousand pounds, and they take up a good amount of space. Even in a large living or family room, your piano can often be the dominant object in the room.

They all produce a pretty big sound, and they all can cost a pretty penny. Cheap Chinese-made uprights can be as little as $3000, long Austrian concert grands can set you back over $150,000 (yes, that’s the right amount of zeros,) and everything in between.

Buying a piano isn’t like buying a new flat-screen TV or your next pair of designer jeans – it’s a beeg deel! You have to plan your space considerations and sound levels (throughout your house, and your neighbors if you live in a condo or apartment,) and be prepared to fork over a sizable amount of cash. And there’s soooo many models and sizes to choose from.

So how do you make this considerbale purchase a little less daunting and a little more pleasurable? There are a few simple rules when it comes to comparing and purchasing a piano. Stick to these formulas below, and you’ll do fine…you’ll even really enjoy the experience.

1. Always purchase the biggest, newest piano you can afford and have space for. Why? Because it’s a fact that the sound gets noticeably richer with each foot of string length you add (piano tuners joke that the defintion of a piano is "anything over six feet",) and new, because it’s pristine and comes with a full warranty in case anything isn’t quite right.
 
2. If buying a new piano, buy only from a reputable dealer. Avoid the grey market or “outlets”, deal only with long-established piano stores that have been granted the franchise for a least two top-name brands. They have too much at stake not to treat you right.

3. There are only a handful of really good piano brand names left (there used to be scores of them in the U.S. alone.)  Which is sad, but if makes your choices a lot easier. My next post will cover some of the better brands. Stick to those fine instruments, and don’t be tempted to lay down good money for some new-fashioned or “off” brand.

4. Set aside a least one full day, or more, to visit many stores and try out many instruments. Which means that…

5. The piano player (not just grandma & grandpa) must be present. Whether it’s the lesson-taking kids, or an experienced adult player, you are the one that’s going to have to listen to and love the sound of it every day. So the actual players(s) need to be present to compare piano after piano. If you’re just the parent or the "money", don’t even think of picking it out for them, let them try and listen to many pianos!

6. Never pay MSRP retail price. Good dealers compete for your business, and there’s room to wiggle. Don’t ask for “cost +10%,” you won’t get it, but haggle a bit, and insist on a matching bench, a free first tuning, and maybe even free moving or no sales tax.

7. Buy the piano you like the best! Once you’ve played a bunch of them, you’ll know which one it is, I guarantee you. It’s too large an important a purchase to compromise – you have to absolutely love it! Buy the one you want and don’t spend days vacillating or rationalizing about the others.

As we mentioned in the last post, perhaps the most critical component in the piano for determining its final tone and resonance is the soundboard, If there were no soundboard under the strings to amplify their vibrations, the piano would sound as thin as a banjo. Actually, this wide slab of wood under the strings (or behind them in an upright) is usually not one piece of wood, but made up of several quarter-sawn spans of spruce, glued together.

      
We also emphasized the importance of the ribs glued to the back of the soundboard, critical because they hold the soundboard in a slightly convex bowed shape, or "crown." The soundboard isn’t really flat as it may appear, it’s raised slightly towards its middle.  If the soundbaord flattens out and loses its “crown” (which it most certainly will in time – anywhere from 50-100+ years,) the string pressure against the bridge and soundboard will become loose and the tone will suffer greatly.

So the better piano manufacturers use the best quality wood they can find for the soundboard and ribs, and cut & glue the ribs with precision to insure the longest possible life for the soundboard’s crowned shape.

Almost exclusively, the wood of choice for soundboards is spruce. And not just any spruce, but spruce carefully chosen for close grain (for better sound conducting) and that perect balance between strength and suppleness. It must be strong enough to withstand the immense pressure from the strings, but supple enough to vibrate freely with resonant tone.

Piano makers since the 18th century have scoured the world’s finest spruce forests, looking for spruce that would make the most resonant soundboards. An overwhelming majority of this soundboard spruce for American pianos has come from the Sitka region of Alaska. European and Japanese pianos have also used Sitka spruce, and have found great stands of spruce in European forests also.

Because of the immense pressure of the soundboard, as well as wide humidity fluctuations wherever you live, it is not uncommon for soundboards to develop lengthwise cracks in them, often running right along the glued seam between any of the quarter-sawn spans. Henry Steinway once said he’d be surprised to see any of his soundboards over 15 years old that didn’t have a least a crack or two running through them. Although these cracks can look ugly, curiously, they often have little or no effect on the piano’s sound. The overall area of resonating wood is so large, the string vibrations still get evenly distributed over the soundboard despite the cracks.

One condition where soundboard cracks do effect the sound negatively is when the split is not only side-to-side, but where the wood one or both sides of the crack lifts upward, coming loose from the rib below it. Not only can this result in a dead resonance in that spot, but a nasty buzz can occur where the now-unglued rib just barely contacts the soundboard. Often, if you hear a buzz when playing an older piano, most prominent in one section of your keyboard, this loose rib is the cause. Fortunately, it is often a straightforward repair to work some glue between rib and soundboard and draw the two of them together with a screw, which can later be removed

Below we can see some  examples of cracks running through a grand piano soundboard, then across the back of an upright soundboard:

In later posts, we will talk about completely rebuilding older top-name grand pianos, what’s involved and whether it’s truly worth it. It cetainly involves installing all new hammers and damper and other felts, and competely restringing the piano, often with a fresh new pinblock. Many fine technicians know how to do these replacements, and consequently offer their services as a piano rebuilder. But almost none of these have the skill and heavy equipment necessary to replace the entire soundboard of a piano…it’s really a factory job. So it’s critical that each technician measures how much crown is left in the current soundboard, because restoring all the rest of a piano that has a flat or soon-to-be-flat soundboard is certainly a waste of much time and money.

If you stretch a strand of wire, fabric or even gut, to a tight tension, and then pluck it, it will make a sound. Children often explore this by stretching a string between two cans and then trying to talk over the "wire’, or even by just stretching and plucking the rubber band that was wrapped around the Sunday paper.

But the sound created by a wire stretched across thin air, no matter how thick or tight the wire, is pretty thin and soft. Once you stretch the wire across an amplifying body, like a slab of wood, the sound can grow exponentially in richness and volume. This is the theory behind all soundboards – the wooden top of a violin, a guitar, and the large wooden diaphragm spanning every piano.

As in the violin and guitar, the strings don’t actually touch the soundboard, but are suspended just above it, laying across a one or two bridges, themselves made of wood or some other efficient sound-conducting material. When the strings are set into motion, the vibrations pass down through the bridge into the larger wooden slab, the soundboard, which then itself vibrates across the whole breadth of wood grains, producing a deep, rich tone. Piano manufacturers scour the earth for the most close-grained, sound-resonant woods they can find, of which spruce has been the favorite.

Here’s a photo of a full grand soundboard, with the short bass bridge and longer snaking treble bridge already glued into place on top, before it gets installed or strung in the piano:

In order for the soundboard to hold it’s slightly bowed shape (for better resonance and resistance to the pressure of the strings,) angled ribs are glued on to its back:

On a grand piano, you can see these ribs by looking up from underneath the piano. The strings then cross over the bridges, themselves made of a very resonant wood, and the strings’ vibrations are conducted down into the soundboard. As you can see in this photo, the strings arre then wrapped around "hitch pins" on the iron plate to hold them at the back end. On the front end, as we have seen, they are coiled around the tuning pins.

The bridges are just slightly higher than the plane of the string running front to back, meaning that they lift the strings a tiny bit higher than perfectly parallel to the soundboard. This insures the massive downward pressure of the strings. The true contact between the strings and the bridge is further secured by forcing the strings to jag to a slight angle, accomplished by a set of angled "bridge pins" for each note, here seen across the treble bridge…

  And the bass bridge:

Happy and musical 2009!

Over the course of 2008, we looked at this marvelous instrument, the piano, from its original invention, it’s history & evolution, and its pre-eminence as it flourished in the 20th century. Just before the New Year, we beagn exploring all the components of a modern day grand piano in exploded views and cut-aways, so you can see all the piano’s parts from the hugest to the tiniest, and how they all work together. Now that we have a sense of the major structural parts like the case, pin block and cast iron frame (refer back to the exploded view of a grand in our last post by clicking here,) let’s take a look at how this beautiful contraption actually produces sound. What exactly happens when you strike the keys?

Here’s a great animated cut-away view of one key and its connected action parts in a grand piano. Watch closely and you’ll see all the essential movements and connection that take place when you press down any key.

The key rocks on a central fulcrum called the "center rail," and as you press the down on the front end, the back end of the long wooden key lifts upward. This in turn lifts the complicated triangle shaped (sort of) wooden mechanism with all the sticks of wood and springs, called the "wippen." Towards the front end of the wippen, you’ll notice a stick of wood that pushes the hammer up toward the string, called the "jack," by pushing against the bottom of the hammer shank (the stick of wood the hammer is at the end of.) If you look closely you’ll see the top of the jack isn’t actually pushing directly against the hammer shank, but against a little orange-&-white ball hanging under the shank, called the "knuckle." You’ll also notice how the "L"-shaped jack snaps out from under the knuckle at the last moment, just before the hammer hits the string. That’s called "escapement," as we covered in our piano history posts, and that’s what allows the hammer to fall back away from the string, freely, instead of blocking against the string, which would effectively stop the sound.

Finally, you’ll notice that although the hammer bounces back away from the string, it doesn’t fall all the way back down, being caught momentarily at about half-way down by the "backcheck." the red, white and orange cushion sticking up from the back of the key. The orange color is actually a layer of buckskin covering, which grabs the hammer’s tail and holds it in check. This, plus the spring-loaded repetition lever (the top-most stick of the wippen’s "triangle") lift and hold the hammer aloft just enough to allow the jack to sneak back under the knuckle, fully ready for another play of the key, even though the hammer has only fallen back about half-way and the piano player has only allowed the key to raise back up about half way. In other words, even though when playing, the key is pressed down a full 3/8 of an inch before hitting bottom, this marvelous mechanism allows the player to play that note again when the key has only come back up about 3/16", instead of having to let the key all the way back up before replaying the note (as in the earliest pianos.)

Of course, all the springs, sticks and buttons of this mechanism need to be in perfect adjustment (or "regulation") in order for this to work correctly, and that’s where your expert technician comes in. There’s about 15-20 adjustments to be made on each key action! But a good technician knows exactly how to do this. It takes a few hours if the piano is completely out of "regulation," or just a short routine service call if just to keep every part in perfect adjustment. Here’s another detailed view of all the parts in a grand piano action, also showing the damper and it’s respective levers. The damper lifts off the string when you press the key, allowing it to vibrate freely, then comes back onto the string to mute it as you let the key up.

So now we’ve set the string in motion, free to vibrate until either the sounds dies out, or we let up on the key, letting the damper fall back down on the string. Next, we’ll look at the acoustics of how that string’s vibration gets amplified into the room and your ears, through the bridges and soundboard.