Stay Tuned

Chickering Upright

2010-06-23T10:13:00.005-04:00

This venerable Chickering upright was built in Boston around 1895, a year before George Chickering died. George had dragged his heels on making the effort to modernize his production, but this upright seems on a par with its contemporaries. This is a classic cabinet grand, big, handsome, and still going strong.

Cool Console #4 - Wurlitzer #2

2010-05-22T10:06:00.007-04:00

Either you will think this is very cool, or you won't. You can't knock Wurlitzer for not trying different styles! This spinet was built in 1939 in DeKalb, Illinois, a mere four years after the console revolution, and it shows just how quickly some manufacturers caught on to that spirit of revolution.

The parts of the case where wood can be seen are made of cherry, stained brown rather than the usual red. The rest of the case is covered in cream-colored vinyl, lightly stippled, which has darkened over time. The keybed emerges like an appendage from the dominant vertical box, making the legs almost unnecessary. The angled front, which serves as a music desk, is actually part of the lid, which is not hinged - after unscrewing, one simply lifts it off. My favorite parts are the roll-top fallboard, the faux lyre, and the decorative brass-plated ferrules at the top of the legs.

Compare this Wurlitzer to the one I wrote about earlier.

Related website:
A short history of the Wurlitzer Company.

1878 Chickering Grand

2010-05-15T18:16:00.011-04:00

This Chickering concert grand (8' 8") from 1878 belongs to a church that was built in 1852. I first saw the piano on its side, stored in a dark alcove with other forgotten items. It had once been the main piano in the sanctuary, but it was considered too old to maintain. At some point, the small space it occupied was needed, and the church was prepared to "get rid" of the piano. A member of the congregation campaigned single-handedly to save the piano, and even bring it back to life. That turned out to be my job, and it was a delight. The piano was actually in very good condition, and did not require rebuilding, just repair and reconditioning. It was moved to its current room on the ground floor, and is now getting regular use.

The main feature of this piano is that it is straight-strung. That is, the bass strings do not cross over the treble strings, but run parallel to them instead. The bass strings are iron-wound, and sit on their own bridge. The hammers are also original, as are the ivories and ebonies on the 88 keys. The case veneer is rosewood, pieced together in four sections. The piano's tone is lovely, but clearly not modern. It has little power, but plenty of sustain, except in the upper treble, which is typical for pianos of this age. I suspect it had much more power back when the soundboard was newer. It's very rewarding to play.

A 440

2010-05-15T12:50:00.002-04:00

This poem is from Jane Shore's most recent book, A Yes-or-No Answer: Poems, published in 2008 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

A squatter in my parents' house,
their Baldwin Acrosonic spinet
didn't leave home until my father died,
and having nowhere else to go,
was shipped here to my living room.

After ten years' sitting, it's out of tune,
the A mute, the damper pedal broken,
the B above middle C sunken in,
the battered walnut veneer embossed
like a notary's raised stamp.

The piano tuner unpacks the tools
stored in his rolling suitcase.
Sweeping generations of photos
from the dusty lid – Russian relatives,
my daughter's school portraits –

he stacks sheet music on the coffee table,
pulls out a silvery tuning fork
from his left breast pocket, bangs it
against his balding skull, holds it
to his good right ear, and listens hard,

refreshing his ear to the sound of A
above middle C, the piano's axis mundi.
I should leave, but mesmerized,
I watch his hairy arm and left hand
disappear inside the piano's innards,

cranking the tuning hammer this way
and that, moving the rubber mutes
along the strings, a little sharp,
a little flat, up and down the scale
while his right hand strikes the keys.

Two hours later, when he's gone,
on the piano bench lies a bill
twice higher than his estimate;
the lid wiped clean, the photos
approximate to where they were,

and also, fished out of the piano,
there's a three of clubs from a deck
I threw out years ago,
five pennies turned pewter gray,
a condolence card, the envelope

sealed with crackled yellow glue.
Its sender, now, has passed on, too.
It's been decades since I practiced
Für Elise or banged out torch songs
from 1000 Standard Tunes,

fakebook my father finagled from
his old musician buddies,
the boys he used to play with
in the big bands.
When I lost my father, I lost music.

When my daughter took lessons,
I'd sit beside her on the bench
just as my father once sat with me,
encouraging, correcting, wincing,
but I wouldn't play a single note.

The church bells across the street
begin to toll the quarter hour –
dividing my day, every day,
into bite-size intervals,
from seven in the morning

until seven at night, another
axis mundi. I find the key
and, instrument in tune, peck out
the melody to the first
Duet for Church Bells and Piano, opus 1.

- Jane Shore

Cool Console #3 - Wurlitzer

2010-05-13T16:51:00.009-04:00

This is one of my all-time favorite spinet designs. The Wurlitzer company, originally based in Cincinnati, Ohio, made a zillion different console models, many of them quite imaginative. Wurlitzer was one of the handful of companies that immediately embraced the new console design concept when it was introduced in the United States in 1935. This piano was built in DeKalb, Illinois, in about 1943, just as Wurlitzer stopped production during World War II.

As with the Krakauer spinet I wrote about earlier, this design emphasizes the square grand shape, but in a more stylized way. The vertical box holding the plate and strings is given some shape rather than being hidden, and the fake lyre is just a decorative gesture. The fallboard is a Wurlitzer classic - it slides out flat over the keys, with the knobs facing up, and then the hinged front swings down to complete the closure.

The veneer is basic mahogany, and I love that light horizontal band of veneer above the keyboard. It is also mahogany, the veneer quarter-cut to emphasize the vertical grain, and lightly stained to contrast with the case. All the furniture details are delightful - the band of beading around the keybed, the filigree on the music desk, and, oh, those legs!

Related website:
A short history of the Wurlitzer Company.

Never Did That Before!

2010-01-09T16:51:00.000-05:00

One thing I love about my appointment book is that I don't have to remember what I'm doing next. I just look in the book to see what's next. My wife is always asking me, "So where are you going tomorrow?" I always cheerfully reply, "I have no idea, it's written in the book."

One morning, after consulting my book, I prepared myself for the day and headed off. I was going to be tuning first at the home of a loyal and regular customer with a somewhat common name - let's just call him Smith. I arrived at Smith's house and rang the bell. A man answered the door, and I recognized him as a neighbor I had once met. I explained that I was there to tune the piano, and he explained that he was babysitting until Mr Smith came home. Smith hadn't said anything about my arrival, but the sitter let me in, and I started work.

About halfway throught the tuning, Mr Smith came home. He was happy to see me, but confused. "Not that it's a problem, but I thought you were coming tomorrow," he said. I assured him that the appointment was for today - it was in my book, after all. I checked the book just to be sure, and to my horror I saw that my customer was right. So where was I supposed to be? At the home of a different Smith!

I also write the town next to the customer's name in my book, and I had failed to register the difference between today's Smith and tomorrow's. I had seen the name, I knew where he lived, and had driven there. Mr Smith was quite gracious - if I had to leave and come back tomorrow, that would be fine. I called Mrs Smith, who had been waiting patiently for me in the other town, and apologized. I explained what had happened, and she thought it was pretty funny. Not to worry, it was OK with her that I come tomorrow, she said. I thanked her, hung up, and finished Mr Smith's piano. Writing information down is one thing, remembering to read it carefully is another!

Grotrian-Steinweg

2009-12-21T12:05:00.000-05:00

I don't get to see very many of these - a Grotrian-Steinweg upright, built in Braunschweig, Germany, in 1927. This upright came here not too long ago from England. It is in very good condition, beautiful ivories on the keys, a nice mahogany veneer with a quite dark red stain - it is almost black, like a really dark rosewood. It has 85 notes.

The tone of this upright is distinct. It has a nasal quality, but little of the higher frequencies associated with American pianos. The soundboard has flattened, so there is little power, and the tone tends toward dark and lush.

If the name after Grotrian seems familiar, that's no coincidence. Heinrich Steinweg, a German piano maker, came to New York and established a company under his Americanized name, Henry Steinway. With him were three sons, hence Steinway and Sons. But another son named Theodore stayed in Germany and continued making pianos there under the original name Steinweg (pronounced "SHTINE-vaygh"), in partnership with Friedrich Grotrian.

Two of Henry's sons died in 1865, so Theodore came to New York to help his father. Theodore was an amazing piano designer, and he ended up being responsible for many of the Steinway patents that helped the company become what it is today. Theodore sold his company in Germany to three of his employees, including Wilhelm Grotrian, son of the late Friedrich. They were allowed to continue using Theodore's name for ten years. After that, the company started using the brand name Grotrian-Steinweg, and that's when the trouble started. The lawsuits began in Germany, and ended up in the United States, and were fought off and on for a century.

It was eventually decided by the US courts in 1975 that Grotrian's use of the Steinweg name was a trademark violation, so now Grotrian makes pianos for export to the United States under the single name Grotrian. They are quite lovely pianos, and are still being made in Braunschweig (which is sometimes rendered in English as Brunswick).

For more on the century of litigation, see Grotrian vs. Steinway.
By the way, Grotrian has a cute musical game on their website called the Pianolina.

Bachmann, Berlin

2009-12-20T12:00:00.005-05:00

This beautiful Bachmann upright was built in Berlin, Germany. I can't seem to find any reference to this company anywhere, so I can't say for sure when it was built, even though I know the serial number. It was probably built in the very early 20th century.

I looked all over the piano for a date. Sometimes whoever worked on the keyboard will sign their names with a date on the first few keys. I've even seen the signature of a manufacturer and a date proudly written on the inside of the case. A hammerhead might carry a date, or the plate might have a date cast into it. If the piano has been worked on by someone who knows when it was built, he might pencil the date on the plate, or on the keyframe behind the keyslip, or stamp it into some wooden case part. In addition to serial numbers, there are also case numbers, used as reference in the factory before the serial number has been assigned. If the action was made by a separate action maker, it could have its own serial number, or a date stamp. Rebuilders sometimes switch parts from different pianos, creating great uncertainty about when a piano was actually built. On this piano I found various numbers, but no date, alas.

Bachmann's name is carved into the veneer of the fallboard, something I'd never seen done before. Usually the maker's name is attached as a decal, or sometimes inlaid. Another name is carved into the keystop rail, beneath Bachmann's name; Rosen's, apparently a piano dealer in Cape Town, South Africa.

It is a typical German upright with a bird-cage action (like the Berlin-made Waldmann I posted about earlier, also from South Africa), and an over-strung bass section. The keytops were probably originally ivory, but they have been replaced with ivorine. The gorgeous veneer is book-matched walnut, with burled walnut panels. There used to be candelabra attached to the two side panels in front. The turned balls and collars on the legs are a nice touch.

Bird-cage action!

August Pitch Report

2009-08-28T12:51:00.005-04:00

The middle-of-August heat wave finally convinced us swamp Yankees to turn on our air conditioners. For our pianos, it was too little too late. The heat wave was humid, but not as bad as in June and July.* The difference was that June and July were cool, so no one turned on the AC. Now the pitch on most pianos, even those with humidity control, is quite high, but not evenly so across the keyboard. Most pianos right now are almost comically out of tune. If you can wait, they'll actually sound better later in the season (if it's not too wet an autumn). If you can't wait, and you certainly cannot if you're gearing up for the return to school, your tuner will have a lot of work ahead of him or her.

Expect the pitch to be 15 cents or more high right in the temperament octave. I'd recommend dropping the pitch to about 6 cents high (A441.5). If you have to go to A440, plan on a pitch-lowering before tuning. The pitch might not be quite so high below the temperament octave. The top of the bass section will be about 5 cents high, rising to maybe 10 cents high around C2, then dropping back down, possibly to zero, at C1.

On the treble end, the pitch will actually drop as you approach the tenor/treble break. C5 will be about 5 cents or so high. But don't be fooled, right after the break, you'll be back at 15 cents high. Then the pitch will quickly drop to about 10 cents high or less around C6, where it might stay, or might drop slowly to zero by C8.

You'll have to keep alert about octave 4 and the part of octave 5 above the break - the pitch is going to want to drift up as you're working. Keep your wits about you if you want to be done in a reasonable amount of time. Every piano I've tuned recently has been a struggle. Good luck.

*A quick example: today is a comfortable 70 degrees F with about a 60 degree dewpoint, cloudy with rain approaching. This translates into a relative humidity of 70 percent, which is quite high in spite of how comfortable it feels. If the temperature hit 90, even with a higher dewpoint of 70 (which would feel pretty muggy), that would only be a relative humidity of 50 percent.

Click here for an explanation of humidity (from my website).
Click here for weather calculators at the National Weather Service website.

Cool Console #2 - Kawai

2009-08-24T17:12:00.007-04:00

I love this little Kawai console, with its vertical plain-stripe walnut veneer. The furniture style, called "continental," features no front legs, flat sides, a large, broad bottom board, and a plain front board that angles back to a narrow top. The lid is hinged in back. It would be more traditional to have only two pedals, but the American market demands three. It was built by Kawai in Japan in 1983. This console model was a very successful model for Kawai, and it is a lovely little instrument.

I had never seen one of these with this kind of veneer before. Usually vertical stripe veneer is used as an accent on small horizontal elements, not across the entire piano. It is not everyone's cup of tea, but I think it works adorably with the style. The stripes come from how the wood is cut to make the veneer. The cut is called a quarter cut (or the wood is said to be quarter-sawn), which means that the cut is 90 degrees to the grain, along or parallel to the tree's radius. You can see that it takes five pieces to cover the width of the piano.

Free-Ranging Pianos

2009-07-14T19:33:00.008-04:00

There is a lovely, romantic fantasy everyone seems to have about playing the piano outdoors. The power of this fantasy may lie in the near impossibility of achieving it, given the half-ton-or-so weight of a piano. Or perhaps the Romantic-era piano music we are all so familiar with inspires visions of mountains, forests, and seas. Countless CD covers and posters have featured grand pianos on the beach, in the woods, on mountaintops. Good luck bringing this fantasy to life, though - nature is not kind to pianos.

One common approach is to have a room especially dedicated as a piano room, with big picture windows facing out onto your favorite natural vista. If this is your dream, I have a couple of suggestions. It is pretty important to have both the room's temperature and humidity controlled so the piano is not destroyed. You will want to play in your shirtsleeves in the middle of a moonlit snowfall, for instance, or play to the setting sun with a cool sea-breeze blowing through. You will be ecstatic, but your piano will be unhappy. Direct sunlight is particularly bad. If you can't bear to have curtains and shades blocking the sun, then you need to treat the windows to lower the amount of radiation coming in and baking your piano. Your soundboard will crack within a few years no matter what you do, and the piano will never stay in tune. It may be worth it to you, though.

Another approach is to have a small, nearly portable piano that you can carry around with you. I knew of a guy who had one of those 69-note minipianos that he kept in a van. If he were camping at a music festival, he could wheel the piano down a ramp and join in on a jam session out in the woods or on the beach. Portable electronic keyboards present a similar, though much less romantic, possibility; you can get a small solid-state generator to provide the electricity (or bring a really long extension cord).

I have seen old upright pianos living on porches, somewhat protected from the elements, slowly rotting and falling apart, but available for outdoor playing until it's no longer possible.

Here is one of my favorite news stories, from CNN in November of 2008. Someone apparently left a piano in the woods of Cape Cod, in the middle of conservation land in Harwich MA, just before Thanksgiving. It had not been there long, so it had suffered no ill effects, but no one knows where it came from or how it got there. The police were called, and they rescued it, you might say, but no one claimed it. I hope somebody besides the squirrels got to enjoy playing it under the trees.

Here's another approach: this pianist, named Yosuke Yamashita, has performed a couple of times on a grand piano outdoors, but with a twist. The piano is set on fire first before he plays it, and then he plays for as long as he can. Here's one video. I don't know if he lets the tide take the carcass out to sea, like a dead whale, but that would seem appropriate.

Now to the actual point of this post, which is the work of an English artist named Luke Jerram. Among his installations is a project he calls Play Me, I'm Yours. For a limited time, he places pianos in public outdoor spaces in a city, and passersby are encouraged to tickle those ivories. The pianos are later donated to organizations in the city. He has done this in Sydney, Australia, São Paolo, Brazil, and most recently, London, England, where thirty uprights, decorated by artists, were placed.

I love the idea of the outdoor urban piano. It is much more social than the idyllic, solitary reverie with nature most people imagine with outdoor pianos. Jerram outfitted each piano in London with a book of music, the pages laminated, so people could gather around the piano and sing along. Quite often crowds would gather when the pianos were played. Two or three people might share a piano. Other musicians would appear with their instruments. Jerram noted that he was surprised by how many people knew how to play at least a little bit, and felt free to do so in public.

Jerram doesn't say much about how the project is put together. Judging from the photos, some of the pianos look pretty old - they're apparently donations and cast-offs. The website for the London show credits a piano-moving company, but I wondered if the pianos get repaired and tuned. Then I read a NYT article, which said a "piano tuner who travels around on a bicycle, providing on-the-spot help, has had to bring in reinforcements to deal with all the wear and tear." Aw, brings a tear to my eye! You can see that the pianos and benches are secured and locked in place. One picture shows a plastic sheet pushed aside, so I guess they get protected this way from the rain. I also read about pianos in parks getting locked up at closing time, so maybe there's a group of volunteers who tend to the pianos each day. Here is the New York Times article about the London event. Here are a few more photos from the artist.

Wm Knabe & Co

2009-07-06T11:52:00.010-04:00

This lovely grand was built in Baltimore, Maryland, in about 1890. Knabe (pronounced "k-NAH-bay") was one of America's premier makers, and after the Civil War was considered on a par with Steinway, Chickering, Mason & Hamlin, and Weber. This piano was made when the company was still run by a Knabe; Ernest, the son of the founder William.

Knabe figured prominently in the formation of the American Piano Company in 1908. George Foster, a business school grad, had started out as a reed organ salesman, and by 1894, the year Ernest Knabe died, had formed a partnership with William Armstrong to manufacture pianos in Rochester NY. Their first major acquisition was the Marshall & Wendell Co of Albany in 1898. Finally, a decade later, after acquiring a number of other companies, they incorporated as American Piano Co. Knabe was one of the cornerstones of the company; Chickering & Sons, bought in the same year, was the other.

But long before those events, this 7½ foot walnut-veneered grand rolled out of the factory in Baltimore, as would many more until about 1930, when Knabe was moved to the American Piano Company's factory campus in East Rochester. Pianos with the Knabe name continued to be made in East Rochester for another 50 years. After a hiatus of passing through various owners, a Knabe line was developed and manufactured in Korea in the late 90's, and finally bought by the Korean maker Samick in 2001. Samick continues to manufacture pianos with the Knabe name.

A few details about the instrument: it has 88 notes, two bridges, a pieced (rather than molded) case, and a sloped pinblock not covered by the plate. The action has wooden brackets, and uses a wooden rocker mechanism rather than the modern threaded brass capstan to regulate the connection between the keys and the wippens. It has a surprisingly modern tone for a 120-year-old piano.

Cool Consoles - Introduction

2009-06-09T10:06:00.004-04:00

Every piano manufacturer has been proud of its big pianos - the cabinet grands, the parlor and concert grands, even the square grands back in the day. But the piano-makers' bread and butter since the 1920's has been the small pianos - the baby grands, and especially the consoles and spinets. It was in the 20's, as smaller homes and apartments were being built, that the American consumer, especially the American housewife, began to turn away from the big pianos, particularly the tall, boxy upright player pianos that had been so popular. The newfangled radio, for example, was smaller, and prettier besides.

In response, manufacturers tried to make their uprights less imposing by scaling down and simplifying the design. But it was still a big brown ugly box. Even when they started making smaller uprights, about 48" tall, they were nothing more than miniaturized versions of the big uprights. Fortunately, as upright sales plummeted in the 30's, the baby grands had become very popular, and kept the industry from collapsing altogether during the Depression.

In 1934, the Swedish piano company Lundholm designed a small upright piano that was completely different from the regular uprights. It was very short, the cabinetry was attractive and not boxy, and the action was redesigned to fit the smaller space. The Associated Piano Co of London immediately bought the rights to the design and began manufacturing them as Minipianos. In 1935, the Minipiano was licensed to Hardman, Peck & Co in the United States. At the same time, both Haddorff and Winter & Co introduced their console pianos, and within months the industry had completely changed. Baldwin and Wurlitzer introduced their console designs, and every manufacturer joined the race to create as many different furniture styles as possible with the new design. These minipianos were an instant hit with consumers in spite of their failings as instruments.

The small pianos came to be called spinets. Historically, spinet was the name for a particular kind of small harpsichord (possibly, but not definitely, after Spinetti, the name of an Italian maker). It now means a small upright with a drop, or indirect-blow, action. What this means is that the action is below the level of the keys, and the keys pull up on the wippens to move the hammers. This is different than a direct-blow action, which sits above the keys, and the keys push the wippens up.

The name console was coined by the French maker Henri Pape in the 1820's to describe his design of a small upright. This was at a time when uprights were seven or eight feet tall. So any small upright is a console upright, and spinets can be said to be a kind of console upright. After the introduction of the spinet in 1935, manufacturers also began making small direct-blow actions in decorative consoles slightly taller than the spinets. The larger of these console uprights came to be called studio uprights, and the smaller, which employ a compressed version of the action, are now simply called consoles, in a way meant to distinguish them from spinets and studios. For this series of postings, however, I will use the word console to mean any small console upright, including spinets.

The furniture styles of consoles range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from elaborate reproductions of historic styles to space-age modernism. I really love them, the more outlandish the better. As instruments, however, they leave much to be desired. Studios eventually became serious instruments, but the consoles are really too small to have high-quality sound, especially in the bass. The bridge design and placement sometimes results in poor tuning stability and sound quality. The compressed direct-blow actions are not very responsive, and the drop actions require short keys whose leverage is all wrong. When manufacturers began cutting corners to cut costs, especially in the late 60's and 70's, the consoles with their inherent design compromises and flaws suffered tremendously. Still, at their best, some of these consoles wound up sounding pretty good, and playing quite adequately.

Wurlitzer, under the Baldwin name, was the last US manufacturer to make spinets, in the mid 1990's. Consoles, however, are still quite popular, and are actually better made now than they were 20 years ago. Sadly, the furniture styles have boiled down to a handful of not very inspiring quasi-historical designs. When I do encounter a cool console, though, I will document it in a posting here.

Cool Console #1 - Krakauer

2009-06-08T12:47:00.006-04:00

This lovely spinet is a Krakauer made in 1946. Krakauer Brothers of New York City was one of the few mid-sized piano companies to avoid being swallowed up by one of the large piano conglomerates in the 1920's and 30's. It wasn't until 1980 that Kimball took control of the name.

This piano was designed to look less like an upright and more like a small square grand, a common design approach for the time. The ribbed bowed sides are meant to disrupt the necessary vertical box holding the plate and strings, and draw attention to the flat horizontal box holding the keyboard and action. The veneer is a lovely walnut, with vertically oriented grain on the keyslip, the stretcher above the fallboard, and the pedal stretcher. The bottom board has a fake lyre above the pedals. The medallion above the fallboard has the name Krakauer stamped into ivory-colored celluloid. The inlaid daggers above the legs are an especially nice touch.

Piano Lessons

2009-05-29T13:54:00.002-04:00

I am learning to play
"It Might As Well Be Spring"
but my left hand would rather be jingling
the change in the darkness of my pocket
or taking a nap on an armrest.
I have to drag him into the music
like a difficult and neglected child.
This is the revenge of the one who never gets
to hold the pen or wave good-bye,
and now, who never gets to play the melody.

- Billy Collins, from the poem Piano Lessons

The Plastic Piano #1 - PVC

2009-05-25T13:24:00.005-04:00

I went to my customer's house prepared to tune her piano. She had warned me that some notes weren't working, usually not a big deal. As soon as I opened the piano and looked inside, I could see the problem. There were shards of a yellowish white plastic all over the place. Oh no, plastic action parts!

To be fair, there's nothing wrong with plastic action parts if they're made correctly - the same can be said of wooden parts. This piano, a beautiful console made in 1957, had action parts made of PVC, and I'm sure the parts worked well for a time. Now the plastic had begun to disintegrate, and the parts would have to be replaced.

PVC, polyvinyl chloride, is usually referred to simply as vinyl. It is one of the most widely used plastics. It can be molded into things like pipes, it can be made into shiny cloth, and it can be bonded to fabric for use in upholstery, mimicking leather. The properties of vinyl chloride had been investigated as early as the late 19th century, but it wasn't until the 1930's that a commercially viable plastic was developed. PVC is quite rigid and brittle, and requires the addition of various plasticizers and stabilizers. Vinyl combined with cellulose acetate (another plastic) as a plasticizer is what replaced lacquer for making phonograph records, starting in the 40's. Vinyl without plasticizers is what is molded into rigid shapes, like pipes for plumbing, and siding and flooring for houses.

Rigid PVC should have been perfect for replacing wooden parts in a piano action. The plastic parts were molded in the same shape as the wooden ones, and installed the same way. The most common plastic parts were flanges, which are the hinged ends of many action parts and are attached with screws to various rails. In some actions, backchecks, jacks, and damper levers were also made of PVC. The only parts that were not made of plastic were the parts that are glued to each other. PVC parts can be bonded together (using the solvent methylethylketone, or MEK, often called PVC glue), but I guess this was not viable for the action manufacturers. I did see a Lindner piano, made in Ireland, probably in the 60's, whose action was entirely of plastic. Even the keys were plastic, made of sheets of PVC glued into long hollow rectangles.

The problem with PVC, as with many other plastics, is outgassing. The various additives that give vinyl its different characteristics slowly evaporate out of the plastic. Over time, some plastic becomes more brittle, or shrinks, or becomes discolored, or, in the case of PVC, spontaneously disintegrates. The technology behind the additives is almost more important than the technology behind the plastic resin itself. When PVC was used for piano actions, the technology for stabilizing rigid PVC must have been in its infancy. It was not foreseen that the outgassing would proceed so quickly, that the actions would start to fall apart in a couple of decades. Modern PVC could be used with no problem, but now the piano industry won't go anywhere near it, and modern plastic action parts are made of other plastics.

The solution is simple, but costly. The parts must be replaced. PVC spinet elbows are replaced with acrylic ones, but other parts are replaced with wooden ones. The parts are readily available because of the demand. Sometimes not all of the PVC is falling apart, so apparently the outgassing varies from batch to batch. For instance, in the case of the console I'm working on, the jacks and backchecks are completely shot, they crumble at a touch, but the hammer flanges and damper levers are fine. They're not the least bit brittle. I won't replace them for now, but I have warned the owner about the possible need for replacement in the future.

There has been one other use of vinyl in pianos. Some of the more crazy and delightful console and spinet case designs from the 40's and 50's used vinyl upholstery fabric in addition to the more traditional wooden veneer. It's found on the sides and top, and Wurlitzer was the main culprit. The vinyl is usually embossed with the classic leather grain, and my favorite example used a white-with-brown-spots cowhide pattern.

Vinyl imitation leather has also been used to replace the leather on the ends of bridle straps, the straps that connect upright hammers to the wippens. Over time, the leather disintegrates (not to mention the strap itself), but the vinyl holds up for much longer. The only disadvantage is that it stiffens up over time and can rattle against the bridle wire. It also becomes harder to remove from the wire. I'll have more to say about the use of artificial leather and suede in pianos in a later post.

The Plastic Piano - Introduction

2009-05-24T12:12:00.003-04:00

The piano manufacturing industry is quite progressive, eager to embrace any new material or manufacturing process. The goal is usually to save money, to keep the price of a new piano down, but sometimes an innovation can add value to a piano, improve it in some way that can be reflected in a higher price or a more competitive product.

Plastic has always been one of those new materials, ever since the industry started using celluloid in the 1870's. The chemistry behind various plastics was not well understood then, and innovation relied on experimentation, sometimes with terrible results. There were three prominent plastics disasters in piano manufacturing history. The first was with PVC, used in the 1940's and 50's to make action parts. Molded PVC parts were successful at first, but as the plastic aged, it tended to spontaneously disintegrate. This effect would take several decades to manifest, so that left a lot of time to build plenty of pianos with PVC action parts, all falling apart now.

The second was with Steinway's Teflon action center bushings. These were tiny inserts made of Teflon, hundreds per piano, that Steinway used in the 70's. They worked well at first, but after a few years they became quite noisy and needed replacing. Steinway tried again with a different size insert, and they did work better, but Steinway eventually abandoned the effort and went back to felt bushings.

The third was less disastrous, but still annoying, and it involved Yamaha's Ivorite, a plastic for keytops developed in the 80's. This plastic is porous, and thus does not feel as slick and slippery as other plastic keytops. It soon became evident that it was a bit too porous. As the plastic soaked up finger oils, it stained in a way that looked, frankly, disgusting. Yamaha reformulated the plastic, and offered to replace all the unsightly keyboards. Now the Ivorite works fine.

These negative experiences with plastic has made the industry wary of introducing more plastic into pianos. Pianos are sold, after all, on their 19th century charm, and nothing screams "modern" (not to mention "cheap") like plastic. The word itself is avoided like the plague, and replaced with phrases like "thermoset composite material," or trademarks like "Ivorite." Often plastic is introduced in small ways, in parts of the piano not visible, or crucial to its function as an instrument. When plastic is obviously employed in a significant way, a whole public-relations blitz is rolled out to carefully explain how the new plastic parts are a huge improvement over the old parts, whether or not that is true. When Kawai used its first plastic action part in the 90's, a plastic jack, I was asked by the local dealer to sign a statement in support that would be used for advertising. I was more than happy to help until I read the statement. It was asking me to agree that the new plastic part was superior to the old wooden part, which was ridiculous, and not true in this case. I refused, much to the dealer's anger.

Nothing has changed the piano in the 20th century as much as plastic has, and I am going to post a number of articles about the plastics used in pianos, all under this heading of The Plastic Piano. I'll keep the series as a permanent link in the sidebar. Glues and wood finishes are forms of plastic, and I will include them.

Modern plastics, and modern chemistry, is a whole different world from eighty years ago, and I am glad to report that current uses of plastic are much better engineered. Some of these parts are not only cheaper, but they really are an improvement over the old parts, taking advantage of the qualities of different plastics as materials. Manufacturers are beginning to be less furtive, less scared of the older disasters. Having tiptoed through the plastics revolution of the late 20th century, maybe the industry can enter the 21st more boldly.

Steinway Square Grand

2009-05-17T15:11:00.019-04:00

Grand pianos come in two shapes: the familiar wing shape, and a rectangular shape referred to as square. Square grands are no longer made, which is why you don't see them often, but they were made as often as their wing-shaped cousins for more than half of the piano's 300 years of existence. If you do see a square grand, it is likely to be pretty old.

This is one of many squares that I have maintained over the years. It was made by Steinway in 1864, and it is in splendid condition. It is not quite seven feet across, with a rosewood case, 88 keys, and two pedals. The left pedal is a moderator pedal; it moves a rail with a thick strip of felt between the hammers and the strings to soften the sound. It has two bass bridges, a tenor bridge, and a long, tightly curved treble bridge. The tuning pins have oblong rather than square ends.

The regular wing-shaped grand has its strings more or less parallel with the keys, running from the keyboard back to the tail. The square grand has its strings more or less transverse to the keys, running from left to right. The wing shape evolved from the harpsichord. There were also square harpsichords (called virginals), but the square grand evolved from the rectangular clavichord. Wing grands stand on three legs, square grands on four. The lid of a wing grand is hinged on the straight left side, and on a square is hinged along the back.

As did the wing grands, square grands became bigger and bigger over time. Unlike the wing grands, square grands did not scale up well. The transverse string pattern had to be fanned out such that the bass strings run left to right, but the extreme treble strings run parallel to the keys. This requires a similar fanning of the hammerhead angles, key length, and damper felts, making regulation a nightmare. More and more of the tuning pins were placed at the far back side of the piano, making tuning a nightmare. Three or more bridges were needed to accomodate the stringing pattern, and the treble bridge developed a tight curve just at the point where the fanned strings all come together, creating a deadly weakness in the bridge.

What people liked about the square grand was that it was less expensive, and fit more easily in a small space - you could tuck it right into a corner. When upright pianos finally became serious instruments, they took this advantage away from square grands, and by the late 19th century, manufacturers stopped making squares. Or they wished they could stop making squares, because uprights were more profitable, yet demand for squares lingered. The manufacturers made a statement: in 1904, at a professional meeting in Atlantic City, they built a giant bonfire of square grands. Even at that, I have come across a 1930's square grand made by Mathushek, an attempt at modernizing the square.

Square grands are not common, but they are not rare, either. Many were made, and there is nothing particularly valuable about them. You can get them easily for free, so don't get suckered by an antiques dealer. They do not and will never feel or sound like modern pianos. It can cost a fortune to fix or rebuild them because nothing about them is standard, everything has to be custom made or jury-rigged, the work is very labor-intensive, and therefore expensive. Many technicians refuse to go near them. There will be no return on your investment.

They are sometimes very pretty, always awesome, and make great conversation pieces. They are often turned into desks and tables. I've seen the legs turned into pedestals or small side tables. If a square grand is in good condition, and you can find a willing technician, and can afford the repair, it can be a lovely and satisfying instrument.

Technician tips, click here . . .

Tips for Technicians

For tuning, remove the damper mechanism. It comes out as a single piece. First remove the stop rail, which is held in place with three or four knurled nuts. Then slowly rotate all the dampers up, being careful not to catch any levers on the stop rail bolts, snapping them. Holding the dampers clear of the bolts, remove the knurled bolt on the left, and gently lift and slide the mechanism to the left to slip the right pin out of its hole. Place the mechanism on a horizontal surface, where it won't be stepped on. Resume breathing.

If you have an oblong adapter, you can try using it. I prefer a threaded oblong tip, but I hate trying to remove the tip of my regular tuning lever, it's usually jammed on pretty good. I have a spare extension rod with a short head for getting into tight places. That tip comes off easily, so I remove it and attach the oblong tip. Then I slip that rod into the tuning handle, except when tuning the upper treble section, where it's easier to just use the naked rod.

For the treble section, hold the tuning lever at its end with your fingertips rather than trying to grip the whole handle. As you lean way over, keep your shoulders relaxed, use your back as a cantilever. Take breaks to stand and stretch. Pay very close attention to which string goes with which pin so you don't snap a string. The tuning pins are often labeled; wipe the dust away to see. Believe me, you don't want to have to replace a string. The string tension is quite low, so there's no point trying to stretch octaves. For tapping in a loose tuning pin, hold the pin with a small adjustable wrench, leaving the top of the pin slightly above the wrench. Then lightly tap the pin with a small hammer.

The most common adjustment needed is to correct rubbing hammerheads, and the most common repair is of the thread loops for the jack springs. Both require removing the action. If you need to correct rubbing hammers, mark which hammers need shifting.

Remove the keyslip by lifting it up. Using a T hammer with a standard square tip, remove the three or four bolts holding the action in place from underneath the case. Figure out where you're going to put the action before you remove it. A card table works well. I often work with it on the floor. It will not fit on a piano bench. Gently slide the action out of the case. Slide it out perfectly straight and level. It is big and floppy, so be careful. Set it down.

Adjusting the hammers is straightforward, you'll see the problems right away. If the leathers have worn through and the remains are flapping around, just remove them. Only move the hammers that need it, don't get hooked into moving all the hammers around or you'll mess up the alignment with the strings. If a center pin has slipped out, it may need replacing. Perhaps the hammer butt has a split that needs gluing. There is usually some mechanism for adjusting the friction on the center pin, so check that.

The jack spring thread loop is underneath the rocker that the jack is attached to, so you need to remove the key. First, remove the nameboard, usually by removing two big screws at either end. Then remove the hammer of the note whose key you wish to remove. Make sure the jack is pushed down flat against the key. Lift the key until it clears the balance rail pin. This is easier to do in the treble than in the bass. Then begin sliding the key forward. Tilt it so the backcheck can clear the various obstructions. Most of the time this works if you persevere. If the backcheck is rotted, it may fall apart, and you may have to make a new one, so note how it is made. Once the key is out, remove the rocker and replace the thread in the usual manner. Make sure there is enough spring tension to make the jack return smartly. After reassembly, check the key for lost motion. There should be a little bit. The hammer should sit on the rest felt, not be lifted above it. Adjust the lost motion by turning the screws on the rocker. Slightly loosen one screw first, then tighten the other. Often one of the screws is obscured under a rail, so you can try lifting the key and pulling it out just enough to expose the screw.

When you are done with repairs and adjustments, carefully slide the action back in, keeping it straight and level. About halfway in, stop. Check under the plate in back to make sure that the hammerheads at the ends of the sections will not bump into any part of the plate. Check all the jacks to make sure they are in the right position; if you had lifted or removed any hammers while repairing, the jacks probably flipped down, out from under the butts. If so, just push the jacks back into place. Make sure the hammerheads have room to pop up as you do this. Finally, if you forgot to put the nameboard back in, now's your chance.

Resume sliding the action in. If you feel resistance when it is almost all the way in, it is the damper wires having trouble getting back on the felt cushions that are glued to the keys. Don't force the action in, you'll either pop the cushions off or bend the damper wires. Go as far as you can, with a little pressure, then lift the damper wires from above until the offending wire comes free. Then try sliding the action again. You may have to do this a few times. Consider adjusting the wire by rotating the leather rest nut and praying that it doesn't turn to powder in your fingers. Or maybe leave the wire nuts alone.
Contract post

Chickering & Sons

2009-05-08T10:42:00.013-04:00

Ah, Chickering - at turns eccentric, maddening, brilliant, heart-breaking! Being a Boston Chickering fan is a lot like being a Boston Red Sox fan. There's even the rivalry with a New York team named Steinway. In the great Paris Exhibition of 1867, both Chickering and Steinway claimed top prizes (and fought over who had "won"), but even then, Steinway was in the lead technologically, and never looked back.

It wasn't that Chickering was not innovative. Their penchant for tinkering was such that it is said that no two Chickerings were made alike. Their innovations, however, did not often lead to an actual evolution of piano design and manufacture. When the last Chickering brother passed away, in 1896, their pianos were charming, but obsolete by the time they rolled out the factory door.

The administration of George Chickering had been a disaster for the company, which had had to wait until he died to begin modernizing their designs. Until the company was finally bought by the American Piano Company, twelve years later, it produced a run of more modern grand pianos. Some of these "transitional" pianos are a nightmare, some are fantastic, and all are targets of eager rebuilders wanting to restore the glory and beauty of a Chickering grand. This task has been the undoing of countless technicians who had no idea what they were getting into, and who did not have the skill to deal with the eccentricities and unconventionalities of these old Chickerings. But the pianos sure are pretty refinished.

In Newport there is a lovely old bed & breakfast called Sanford-Covell Villa Marina. The owner has her grandmother's and great-grandmother's 6'5" Chickering rosewood grands installed in the Victorian parlor. The older one was built in 1892, and the other one is a transitional grand from 1903. The description and close-up photos are of the older piano, on the left.

This grand, made in the waning years of George Chickering's tenure, has a pieced case of four parts: the left straight side; a broad, curved tail; the curve of the right bent side; and the cheek, or straight portion, of the bent side. Modern piano cases, in contrast, are made of a continous, molded rim. The bass bridge is also pieced, in three parts, rather than shaped into a continuous curve (though the cap is continuous). There is a separate bridge for the tenor section. There are 88 notes, and all 88 are agraffed, an unusual feature. Finally, the portion of the plate covering the slanted pinblock is a separate piece on top of which the rest of the plate is bolted.

It would take days to detail the arcana of the action. It suffices to say that the function of the various parts resembles a modern action, but the specifics of their manufacture and assembly are entirely exotic.

Though apparently vexing for the countless technicians of the past century, this is a sweet, lovable, old-fashioned instrument, somewhat frail and rickety, but still pleasing to play.

The Newport Jazz Festival

2009-04-28T19:24:00.008-04:00

Every year I look forward to tuning pianos at the Newport Jazz Festival. The folks who run it have had a tendency to keep the same staff year after year (unless the relationship doesn't work for some reason), so for years I've been seeing the same people, meeting their spouses, watching their kids grow up, seeing pictures of their grandchildren. Working at the Festival feels like a big family reunion.

I got the gig right after piano tech school (at the New England Conservatory), 23 years ago. I wrote them a letter out of the blue, and they called me and asked for a quote. I've been with them ever since.

A few years ago the founder of the Newport Festivals, George Wein, sold his company, Festival Productions. The company had grown over the years, earning George the invariable title impresario, and ran several festivals throughout the world. Many of the jazz festivals were sponsored by JVC, the Japanese electronics company. All of us working at Newport realized that things might change under the new company, Festival Network, and the familiar "See you next year" came to be followed by "with any luck."

Last year the production team was replaced, but the field and stage operations stayed mostly the same. The Festival seemed to go well in spite of the sour economy, though I could see that nothing had been done to rein in costs. This was not a good sign. So I guess I wasn't entirely surprised to learn that there might not be a festival in Newport this year. Festival Network had lost a ton of money, the State of Rhode Island had not been paid, and permits had been revoked. Then, just to add to the uncertainty, JVC pulled its sponsorship of all festivals worldwide.

Not wanting to lose his first babies, the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals, George Wein has decided to disentangle himself from Festival Network and produce these two festivals himself. This year will be the 50th anniversary of the Folk Festival, and the 55th anniversary of the Jazz Festival. I'm assuming that George will keep most of the old staff in place, but one never knows, so cross your fingers for me!

You can check out the New Festival Productions website here. While you do that, here are two of my favorite stories from the Newport Jazz Festival.

How I Met Herbie Hancock Underneath a Piano

The Festival hires me to come in very early in the morning to tune the pianos, which have been sitting on outdoor stages all night. Then I remain in attendance all day, touching up the tunings amidst the chaos between sets. There are two wings of the main stage; one wing is for the stage crew and all the musical equipment, the other wing is for the stage sound crew and their sound equipment. I usually hang out in this wing and listen to what the sound engineer is listening to.

One year, during Herbie Hancock's performance, there was a terrific bang in the middle of a piece. It sounded the way a significant electrical disconnection sounds, amplified through a gigantic sound system. The music kept going, but the sound guys were wide-eyed, calling each other on walkie-talkies, checking the million dials and knobs. Nobody could find the cause, everything seemed OK, shoulders were shrugged, and then Herbie ended his piece, got up off the piano bench, and climbed under the piano.

"Bill, Bill, get out there!" all the guys yelled, and I ran out onto the stage, as did Herbie's road manager from the other wing. We had a breathless meeting under the piano. "Are you the piano guy?" asked the manager. I nodded. "Good." Then he pointed at Herbie; "Herbie, get out of here!"

The piano's lyre, which holds the pedals, had disconnected from the piano and dropped straight down onto the stage floor, with a bang, in the middle of Herbie's playing. I guess Herbie was going to try to fix it himself. The manager helped me put the lyre back on, and then we scurried to our respective wings, leaving Herbie to introduce his next piece.

I Tuned a Piano So a Guy Could Hit It With Sticks

When I touch up the tuning between sets, I have to be very focused. It's loud on stage as the previous set is broken down and the new one wheeled in place, and the emcee makes announcements, and the sound crew checks things. I stand and lean way down over the Steinway grand, straining to hear the unisons. I stop to help with repositioning the piano, and then start in again, checking and retuning for as long as needed or as long as I can, until the stage manager calls everyone off stage. Sometimes I have 30 or 40 minutes, sometimes ten. I check the schedule ahead of time so I can mentally prepare.

One year, Bobby McFerrin was to perform. The schedule said he was using a piano, which I thought was odd, so I consulted the tech rider and stage plot, and there it was - a grand piano tuned to A440. All right, fine. The piano was going to get heavy use in the prior set, and since there would be little to break down, and nothing but the piano to set up for Bobby, I was going to have ten minutes at the most to touch up the piano. I was already sweating.

When my moment came, I ran out and got to work. It was mercifully quiet, but much too soon the stage manager put his hand on my shoulder, and I put my tools away and walked to my wing. Out came Bobby McFerrin, who greeted the cheering crowd, and then turned to introduce his accompanist, a big burly guy. Bobby started singing, and I watched the big guy, who just stood there looking like he'd wandered, lost, onto the stage. Then he pulled two mallets out of his pocket, and began drumming on the piano. He drummed on the case, on the plate and the soundboard, and depressed the damper pedal and drummed on the strings. He sometimes used the handle end of the mallet. He moved all around the piano, drumming and tapping. That was it. I turned to a fellow crew member and said, "Wow, I just got paid to tune a piano so someone could hit it with sticks."

Staying in Tune

2009-04-21T10:06:00.004-04:00

Why does a piano go out of tune? Here's one short answer: a piano holds strings that are under tension, and any material under tension tends to react in a way to diminish that tension.

This is not to say that the strings are the only material in a piano reacting to tension. Certainly when the strings are new they go through a period of "stretching out," but modern string manufacturing has ensured that this stretching comes almost to a halt within a couple of years. The tension of the strings, however, is brought to bear on many different parts of the piano, and it is the reaction of all these parts to the tension that contributes to the instability of a tuning.

String tension is possible only if the strings are secured at each end, so these end points carry the brunt of the string tension. One end is the hitchpin, which is usually a small steel pin driven into the cast-iron plate. This end is pretty stable. The other end is the tuning pin, which is a large steel pin driven into the wooden pinblock. This end is much less stable because the wood reacts rather strongly to the tension. The tension is enough to slowly pull the pin right out of the wood, a phenomenon seen on many smaller uprights. Before that point is reached, though, the hole that the tuning pin sits in can become sufficiently distorted and enlarged that the pin can rotate, either slowly or suddenly, releasing the string tension.

The string also passes under, over, and around various bearing points, all of which react to the tension. An important bearing point is the wooden bridge, which miraculously carries tension in three directions: each string is bearing downward on the bridge, bearing to the right against one bridge pin, and bearing to the left against another bridge pin. Bridges are known to crack, split, and otherwise fall apart as a result. But even if a bridge doesn't fall apart, the pins still creep and the wood compresses, releasing some of the tension.

The bridge, in turn, bears down upon the soundboard, a giant raft of wood that must support all this tension. This brings us to another short answer to why pianos go out of tune: a piano is made mostly of wood, and wood expands and contracts with changes in humidity. As the humidity changes, and the soundboard absorbs and releases moisture, the board flexes up and down, and the bridge and strings with it. The bridge also rocks and tilts back and forth, and indeed all the wooden parts including the pinblock expand and contract. All this movement changes the tension of the strings.

The soundboard is often constructed under its own tension, pushing upward against the bridge to forestall its eventual collapse. When the humidity is high and the wood expands, it crushes itself against its joints and constraints, and then, when dry, it shrinks and cracks. The glue lets go. It is no surprise that almost all pianos have cracked soundboards.

Even the metal bearing points give way to the string tension. If you examine the agraffes and pressure bars and duplex scales and aliquots and capos, you'll see where the strings have slowly and steadily pressed grooves into the brass and steel and iron.

So it is a wonder that a piano stays in tune at all. Then comes the tuner, and another short answer to why pianos go out of tune: the tuner has to temporarily destabilize the string to add or subtract tension, and may not be successful in restoring the string's stability. The instability introduced by the tuner comes in two forms. Theoretically, the tuning pin simply sits in its hole in the pinblock, but in reality the tuning pin floats in a bed of highly compressed wood, with the greatest compression where the string pulls against the pin. The pin, the wood, and the string have arrived at a temporary stasis, which the tuner disrupts when he or she turns the pin. The tuner must then try to set the pin back in a position where it won't wander under the new tension. I can tell you that this is the trickiest part of tuning.

The second instability comes because of all the string bearing points. Theoretically, any change made to the string's tension applies evenly to the entire string, but in reality the friction of the string against its bearings prevents the even distribution of the tension. The tuner must ensure that there is no extra tension hidden in some section of the string that will suddenly release itself in a glorious detuning as soon as the string is hit with the hammer. This is why tuners strike the notes so vigorously when they tune, to work out the uneven distribution of tension. Some instability is inevitably left behind, to be eventually worked out to the player's dismay.

Damper Lift

2009-04-20T09:13:00.008-04:00

Either you're good at adjusting dampers, or you're not. The difficulty lies in the adjusting mechanism, which is, simply, a wire. You bend it a little this way, a little that way, a little more over here, give it a twist, and the damper sits right. Or it doesn't. It's a puzzle in three dimensions, and you need to have good ear-eye-hand coordination along with the ability to imagine, in your mind's eye and ear, what will happen when you bend the wire. I am good at adjusting dampers, I even enjoy it, and as a result I've been called in on occasion to help other technicians who are having difficulty.

Picture a grand piano. The wooden damper head has felt (usually two pieces) glued to it, and the head sits on top of the string, felt side down, damping any vibration. There needs to be a way to lift the damper head off the string, so a stiff wire is attached to the side of the head, and it drops down through a guide hole and inserts into a wooden piece called the damper lever. When you press the key, or the damper pedal, it is this lever which is lifted, thus lifting the damper head.

The wire is held in place in the lever with a little screw that clamps down on it. The distance from the damper head to the damper lever can be adjusted by sliding the lever up or down on the wire, and then tightening the screw. This is called regulating the damper height, and it is the most common adjustment made, an easy adjustment that most technicians master.

Because there are two ways to lift the damper, using either the key or the pedal, the damper height has to be adjusted so the damper lifts correctly either way. Sometimes getting this right involves making adjustments to the key or the pedal mechanism, but usually one adjusts the damper height so that each key lifts its damper at the same place in the keystroke, and all the dampers lift simultaneously with the pedal. If a damper lifts too soon, it is said to be fast, or early - the damper may not quite fully sit on the string and damp the vibration. If a damper is slow, or late, it may not lift enough to allow the string to vibrate.

When the back of the key picks up the damper lever, your finger can feel the weight of the damper. If the dampers lift unevenly, you can feel this in the keys. You can also hear it when you press down and let up on the damper pedal - on the way down, some notes will ring out before others, and on the way up some notes will damp sooner than others. This was the complaint of one of my clients recently - he had noticed that the bass dampers were lifting before the treble dampers. He has exquisite pedal technique, and this unevenness was driving him crazy.

The most common problem, aside from unevenness, is having the dampers in the middle lift sooner than the dampers at either end. This usually indicates warping of the board that lifts all the dampers when you depress the pedal. This board, called the damper lift tray, is lifted somewhere near the middle by a dowel pushed up by the pedal. The ends of the tray, thus unsupported, can sag under the weight of all the dampers. Over time, the sag can become permanent, and the damper heights (or the tray itself) will need to be adjusted.

It's also not unusual to have the bass or tenor dampers lift early because of how their felts settle and compress over time. The dampers sit lower and lower, causing them to be lifted earlier and earlier. The problem with my client's Steinway grand was a little different, though. The treble dampers lifted pretty evenly, and the bass dampers did also, but the whole bass section lifted earlier than the treble section.

I have come across this problem before in older Steinways. You set the damper height so that the dampers are lifted correctly by the keys, and then when you use the pedal the whole bass damper section lifts early. It turns out that the thickness of the damper-lifting shelf at the back of the key is slightly greater in the bass section. I don't know if this was deliberate on Steinway's part, a notion about damper lift they might have had for a while, or just a manufacturing irregularity.

One solution is to shim the tray - slip a strip of card under the tray felt in the treble section. I took a gamble and decided to even out the damper lift in the usual way, by adjusting the damper height so that the pedal would lift the dampers simultaneously. In particular, I dropped the height of the treble dampers so they would lift earlier (because the owner was also complaining about insufficient pedal throw). This would mean, though, that the dampers in the treble would lift slightly sooner in the keystroke than would the dampers in the bass. The gamble was that the difference would be unnoticeable to the player, and it worked. Another happy customer!

A note about the diagram: this is the arrangement in most makes of grands, but not Steinway. The lift tray is different in a Steinway. First, the levers are attached to the tray rather than to their own rail, which makes for some interesting geometry issues. Second, Steinways do not have the little brass adjuster on the tray, underneath each lever, that you can see in the diagram. That adjuster is wonderful - you can be really sloppy regulating the damper lift, and then just use the adjusters to even out your sloppiness. The Steinway arrangement forces you to be much more careful, and irregularities in the tray (which should be minimal) can be worked out later by shimming.

Friedr. Ehrbar

2009-03-30T12:58:00.021-04:00

This wonderful old grand piano was made in Vienna in about 1892. It came to the United States not too long ago, and was just recently set up in its new location.

The case is pieced together on the bent side, but molded into its curve at the tail. The music desk has two candle stands (what I jokingly call beer and sandwich boards) that can be rotated into position on either side of the music rack. The two pedals, rather than pushing up at their back ends on pedal rods, instead pull down on pedal wires in front of the lyre. The legs have giant wooden screw threads for attaching to the case body. The key slip (in front of the keys) drops down for removal rather than lifting up! There are only 85 notes (typical for the time), but there's an extra bass string at the very bass end, and an extra unison set of treble strings at the other end.

Other than the detailing, this piano seems quite modern in design, until you pull out the action. The action is much more similar to that of a square grand. The cheek blocks (on either side of the keyboard) are glued on, and come out with the keyframe. The keys have a capstan, and there is a wippen, but the wippen and jack face backwards. There is no repetition lever, and the hammer has a butt, as in a square grand. The dampers are set up like modern ones.

A century before this piano was built, there was an active school of piano building in Vienna that used a kind of action that came to be called Viennese. So there is some irony in a Viennese piano having an action much more akin to the English action.

The piano sounds great, not too old-fashioned, and as you can see, it's really beautiful, and beautifully made. I'm glad I brought my camera!

This Old Piano

2009-03-23T18:07:00.004-04:00

I've been trying to help a woman who inherited an old grand piano. She has no place for it, and doesn't want to go through the trouble of selling it (it would not fetch much). She has found someone to give the piano to, but he's very nervous about maintenance costs.

They each consulted local piano technicians. Her technician worked for a piano dealer, so he pronounced the piano a piece of junk, and suggested they get rid of it and buy one of his. All this did was make everyone paranoid about the piano's condition.

His technician was a full-time rebuilder. He loved the piano, said it was wonderful, and suggested that $14,000 would be sufficient to bring it back to life. All this did was make everyone paranoid about the cost of piano maintenance.

Neither of these technicians said anything wrong. They were merely talking up their lines of business. Dealers sell, rebuilders rebuild. Ordinary piano owners, however, don't know about these distinctions among technicians.

The woman contacted me through a mutual friend, and I tried to help her over the phone. Because my specialty is repair, I of course suggested repairing the piano. I gave her an idea of what it might cost, based on her description of what the other technicians had said, but I cautioned that without inspecting the piano, I couldn't be sure. The problem was that the piano was three hours away from me.

After a number of phone conversations, I thought what the hell, and arranged to go see the piano, giving the owner a break on the cost, friend to friend. I was also thinking, though, that if there was enough work and the means to pay for it, and if I could be put up for a few nights, it could work for me. I did this once for a family near New York City. They had a spare apartment, and room in the basement for a makeshift shop, and I spent a week reconditioning their old Steinway upright. They fed me dinner each night (with wine!)

The piano was exactly what I expected: about seventy years old, worn but not abused, no significant damage, playable. It had been an upper quality piano out of the factory. Someone had done a pretty good job of replacing the hammerheads at some point, and the bass strings and tuning pins were replacements, too. The piano was even at concert pitch! I could have just tuned it, and it would have been fine for casual use or beginner's lessons. I drew up a list of things worth doing, all those little maintenance things that had gotten overlooked over the years. It was a great candidate for rebuilding, if anyone had the money. Otherwise, it could be used for another decade, maybe two, but not for professional or heavy use. I would have been happy to do the work.

The intended recipient has been speaking with me, still nervous about long-term maintenance costs, whether the piano is "worth it," wondering if I would do the work piecemeal. I just wrote him a long email, and I thought I'd post some of it here.

The reason why you can find old pianos for free or cheap is because they all need work, and continue needing work. In fact, new pianos need maintenance too, but it gets put off until finally the piano is unplayable and needs a lot of work all at once. Things then just get worse as the maintenance is put off for decades.

An old piano is like an old car - you expect it to need repairs regularly. It just gets worn down. Things loosen or come unglued here and there, it starts making noises. Some of this is easily corrected (depending on who you talk to), the rest you just let go. The key is finding the person who will keep your piano going and not try to gouge money out of you. Like finding the car mechanic who will keep your old clunker going enough to get to the grocery store on a regular basis. The only time you run into trouble is with a piano tuner who doesn't want to do repairs, and who tries to sell you something else, like a new piano or a full rebuilding. Those things are fine if that's what you want. Otherwise, stick with the guy willing to do repairs and you'll be OK.

Here's my advice. Take the piano, it's a pretty OK piano. Find someone to come and tune it. If he (or she) says it can't be tuned, or it needs to be rebuilt, throw him out and find someone else. If he says there might be a little work needed with the tuning pins to hold the tension, then let him do a little work. Only a little. If he says your soundboard has cracks, say "Yes, I know," and leave it at that.

Then play it. It's already playable, just needs the tuning.

Later, say a year or two or three from now, you'll have a better sense of what you'd like from the instrument. Maybe some regulation, maybe some voicing, maybe the inevitable miscellaneous repairs. But keep up with the maintenance. It won't cost you much if you keep up with it.

Consider, after tuning, getting the soundboard fixed. Not all tuners know how to fix an old soundboard without going through all kinds of craziness, so you might have to hunt around, but that would have great benefit for the piano.

Clean and lemon-oil the case, use a scratch cover for the dings, I'm sure you could do this yourself over a weekend. Dust off the plate and strings, use a vacuum if needed, wipe the damper heads (in the direction of the strings). Ask the tuner to run a cloth over the soundboard, under the strings. We have little gizmos for doing that. A clean piano will make you feel better.

If you do want to hire me a year or so from now, the reconditioning offer is still open. I could take care of all those little things that need attention (like the soundboard, and tapping all the tuning pins in, and seating the strings on the bridge correctly, and correcting the voicing and the regulation, and leveling the keys and tidying up the keytops, cleaning up the dampers, etc.) Of course, if you find the guy up there willing to do all these things (and do them correctly), then you'll be all set.

A. Waldmann, Berlin

2009-03-22T10:55:00.005-04:00

The classic bird-cage action:

This little gem is an old German upright that lived most of its life in Johannesburg, South Africa. It resembles several old (and not so old!) English uprights that I have seen over the years. The top action has wooden brackets on either end, and the dampers are carried in a damper action called a bird-cage. In a bird-cage action, the dampers are above the hammers rather than below, and the dampers are lifted by long wires that run down and attach to the fronts of the wippens. It is these long parallel wires that give the action its name. (In a modern upright action, the dampers are below the hammerheads and lifted by metal tabs, called spoons, attached to the backs of the wippens, out of sight.)

Unlike the English uprights, this upright has bass strings that cross over the treble strings, as in modern uprights. (The English uprights are usually parallel-strung rather than cross-strung.) As is typical with European pianos, there are only two pedals. Equally typical is the bookmatched burled-walnut veneer. Sadly missing from this piano are its original candelabra, which had been attached to the front panels above and on either side of the music desk.

The easiest way to tune a piano with a bird-cage action is to remove the bird-cage. Take out the screws holding the cage down (usually one at each end) and lift the cage up and out. Check first to make sure the lift wires are not attached to the wippens - usually they just slip out. Of course now you have no dampers, and the strings all ring out. I have found, though, that I get used to this quickly, and can tune without difficulty. On the lower strings I will use my hand to stop the ringing when it gets excessive.

A full portrait of this pretty little piano:

Is It Worth Rebuilding?

2009-03-01T17:50:00.014-05:00

What appears to be a beached piano is in fact a giant wooden sculpture, one of three created by Florentijn Hofman of the Netherlands, and titled Paal 5. The work was commissioned for the fifth anniversary of the Schiermonnikoog International Chamber Music Festival in 2006, which takes place on the Frisian island of Schiermonnikoog, in the northern Netherlands. I wonder if anything is left of the pianos. Here are a couple more shots:

Related website (with more photos):
Florentijn Hofman

The Investment

2009-03-01T17:01:00.005-05:00

When I posted the poem "To His Piano", I came across a collection of poems that it was in called The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology. This is a wonderful collection of poems about music and musical instruments. It was edited by Helen Handley Houghton and Maureen McCarthy Draper, and published by Persea Books in 2007. Here's another entry, "The Investment" by Robert Frost.

Over back where they speak of life as staying
("You couldn't call it living, for it ain't"),
There was an old, old house renewed with paint,
And in it a piano loudly playing.

Out in the plowed ground in the cold a digger,
Among unearthed potatoes standing still,
Was counting winter dinners, one a hill,
With half an ear to the piano's vigor.

All that piano and new paint back there,
Was it some money suddenly come into?
Or some extravagance young love had been to?
Or old love on an impulse not to care -

Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life?

- Robert Frost

Steinway & Sons

2009-02-27T11:14:00.010-05:00

Another pin-up shot:

This is a classic turn-of-the-(last)-century Steinway upright that I had the privilege of reconditioning many years ago. The case was refinished and is quite beautiful, but of course I prefer to admire the inner workings.

So That's Whose Piano It Was

2009-02-25T20:21:00.006-05:00

He has so many lying around his shop that he just forgot:

PERTH, Jan 20 2009 AAP General News - A piano tuner accused of stealing a grand piano from a university 12 years ago will face court in Perth.

The 57-year-old from Mount Helena, near Perth's Hills, has been charged by the Corruption and Crime Commission with stealing a Steinway grand piano from the University of Western Australia's music school.

A CCC spokesman said the man allegedly stole the piano 12 years ago when he took it for maintenance at his workshop.

He allegedly sold it for $20,000.

Poole Piano Co

2009-02-11T21:09:00.013-05:00

Isn't she beautiful?

I never tire of opening a piano up and gazing upon the action. Those 88 hammers and wippens, those 230-or-so tuning pins and strings, just make my eyes happy. My dad said that I was just like him in this regard. When he was a kid, his mother would give him a handful of pennies to play with, a whole handful of identical objects. He could play with them all day!

I also love those giant bolts and screws on the plate. As a kid, I wanted the screwdriver that could fit those giant screws. My parents wisely kept me away from the screws and focused my attention on playing the keys. But now I own that screwdriver! And I still play those keys! I guess I couldn't be happier.

To His Piano

2009-02-10T08:42:00.006-05:00

Old friend, patient of error as of accuracy,
Ready to think the fingerings of thought,
You but a scant year older than I am
With my expectant mother expecting maybe
An infant prodigy among her stars
But getting only little me instead–

To see you standing there for six decades
Containing Chopsticks, Für Elise, and
The Art of Fugue in your burnished rosewood box,
As well as all those years of silence and
The stumbling beginnings the children made,
Who would believe the twenty tons of stress
Your gilded frame's kept stretched out all this while?

- Howard Nemerov

Hammer Bubbling

2009-02-01T15:17:00.006-05:00

This is the second part of a two-part post. The first part is here.

The Baldwin grand was unplayable. All I was supposed to do was tune it, but I couldn't even do that. Every note was bubbling. When the hammer heads hit the strings, rather than making clean strikes, the heads bounced against the strings, striking multiple times. That is called bubbling. Usually when it happens, it happens with a few notes, or with most of one section, but in this case it was over the entire keyboard.

What causes bubbling is that the keystroke is not matched properly to the hammerstroke. When you press a key, it moves a certain distance - this is the keystroke. The movement of the key causes the hammer to move from rest to contact with the string - this is the hammerstroke. If there is too much hammerstroke, or too little keystroke, or too much free play between the key and the hammer, bubbling will result.

There are some quick fixes: you can eliminate the free play (called lost motion), then increase the let-off, or raise the hammerline, or increase the key dip, or raise the key level. The only problem is that each of these corrections may introduce distortion and unevenness to the action regulation. Slight distortions are tolerable, but past a certain point you simply trade one problem for another. Ultimately, bubbling indicates that the action needs a more thorough regulation.

Six months ago I had tuned this piano, and its action seemed fine. Why was it so far off now? I checked my notes, and found that I had had to eliminate some bubbling then. I had also noted evidence of past technicians making quick, ad hoc adjustments to the action. My plan was to regulate the action thoroughly this summer, when time and budget permitted. But I had to do something right now.

There was no lost motion to eliminate. Normally this is good, but I was hoping for a quick solution, and this is the first thing to try. The keystroke felt too shallow, as if the entire key level needed raising. Unfortunately, that's exactly what I did not have the time and budget for now. At a glance I could see that the hammerline was all over the place; that could be quickly adjusted. The let-off was fine, so I decided not to disturb it. Nor did I disturb the front rail punchings under the keys. Then I thought of something else. One reason the regulation would change so drastically from one season to the next would be if the keyframe was not sitting securely on the keybed. There are special bolts called glide bolts for ensuring this, and I made a quick guess that they hadn't been regulated in a very long time. You can sometimes feel the poor seating in the action, a kind of bounciness, and it will change with humidity.

Regulating an action is like solving a Chinese puzzle - each move affects other moves. Some moves need to happen at the beginning, other moves must wait toward the end, and a lot of moves will need to be repeated. Typically the end moves are done regularly, but the beginning moves will be neglected because they necessitate moving through the entire regulation, for which there is often no time and insufficient budget. Regulating the glide bolts is such a beginning move. But today I decided to gamble on an unorthodox move; I would screw down the glide bolts far enough to actually raise the key level just a little. It's a hack, but a creative one.

I adjusted the glide bolts, raising the key level just enough to help with the bubbling but not so far as to cause other problems. Then I raised the hammerline as far as necessary to eliminate the bubbling, even at the risk of reducing the hammerstroke a little too much. For a handful of notes there was cause to increase the let-off a hair. The bubbling was gone, the action felt a little odd, but it was playable, and perfectly fine for a practice piano. It had taken a little over an hour, thus preserving the budget and not eating up too much time. But I will have to regulate it properly from top to bottom soon - any more creative hacking will just make things worse. Thank heavens there won't be another technician after me to say "What the hell was this guy thinking!"

Creativity or Incompetence?

2009-01-28T15:19:00.014-05:00

This is the first part of a two-part post. The second part is here.

The line between creative problem-solving and hack-work is blurry. A solution acceptable to one may be unacceptable to another. There is room for disagreement, and circumstances are never so clear as to make the best solution obvious. Budgets need to be adhered to, piano usage differs, pianos vary in quality, time is an ingredient. The main difference between hack-work and creative problem-solving is in the use of judgement. Was a repair made hastily with little thinking about the full effects? Was a repair executed poorly for lack of insight about materials or mechanisms? Were money and time not spent out of mere stinginess?

When I was working in a rebuilding shop, the movers one day rolled in a small upright which we promptly took apart and examined. One look at the bass bridge, and we all began laughing and pointing. Some poor soul had attempted to repair the bridge with hilariously disastrous results. Later, one of the crew admitted to having done the work years before, and insisted that it had been a creative solution. It sure looked like hack-work to the rest of us, though.

What this technician had encountered was a bass bridge that had split along the pin line - a common occurrence. Apparently many of the bridge pins had actually fallen out, the rest had shifted well out of place, and the unmoored bass strings were buzzing like crazy. Some people might have said forget it, the piano is junk - it was of mediocre quality to begin with, and the split bridge could have been indicative of many other problems throughout the piano.

The "proper" way to fix the bridge would have been to move the piano to a shop, flip it on its back, remove the trap and pedalwork, loosen the bass strings and move them aside, remove the bass bridge and make and install a replacement. But the sort of owners who have a piano like this are usually the sort who cannot afford such a procedure. Is there a creative solution between these extremes?

Our beleaguered technician tried this: he would fill the crack with epoxy, and then drive in new pins. It wasn't the best idea, and executed poorly it could be a disaster, and without the proper setup it would be cumbersome work, but that's what he did. And he ran into difficulties.

Epoxy does have gap-filling ability, but there is a limit. A narrow crack can be sealed, but this was a canyon he was trying to fill. I'm sure he discovered that you can't draw a cracked bridge back together by clamping, either. And a bridge pin driven into epoxy is not going to hold the way it does in wood. At best this would be an impermanent repair that would perhaps alter the scaling of the bass section and not allow the bass strings to correctly sit on the bridge. But it might eliminate the buzzing and allow for tuning, however temporary, and at little cost. It's potentially a creative solution for the conditions, even given the limitations.

Here's where it all went wrong: the technician had no extra bridge pins, and he hadn't given himself the time to order them and wait for the shipment. He tried making his own by cutting the ends off of small common nails. Even this is creative and not entirely incorrect. A bridge pin does look like the end of a nail. If you did it correctly and carefully you could make a batch of bridge pins this way. But the technician was running out of time, and time is money.

Bridge pins might look like small nails, but they are not installed the way nails are. They are not driven into the bridge, and if you try it you'll see why. Holes of the proper diameter and angle must be drilled first, and the pins are then tapped in. There should be enough friction to hold the pins securely. Our intrepid technician overlooked this detail, and with bridge pins/nails in hand, proceeded to hammer away. The pins ended up angled every which way, some mashed and bent, and not exactly lined up properly. The epoxy set, and for good or ill our man was done.

To his credit, he had eliminated the buzzing, and the piano could be tuned well enough for his customer, who was happy to have not been billed a lot of money for the work. Over time, the epoxy had held, though I'm sure the pins had drifted, and maybe the buzzing had started to come back. I'm sure it was more work and hassle for the technician than it was worth, and ultimately embarrassing.

Next: my turn.

Nice Piece of Trapwork

2009-01-11T11:28:00.011-05:00

I found a design flaw in a Boston grand. Boston is the brand designed by Steinway and built by the Kawai factory in Japan. They're really beautiful pianos.

The notes were making a clanking sound, and I guessed the problem right away. I could feel it - the dampers were jumping up too high at the end of the keystroke, and instead of being stopped by the stop rail, they were hitting the metal sostenuto rail.

So the damper stop rail was positioned too high. That's easy enough to fix, but I had to find out first why the rail was out of position. The usual culprit is that the damper pedal isn't being properly stopped. As a result, every time the pedal is depressed, the damper tray pushes all the dampers hard into the stop rail. Over time this succeeds in pushing the damper stop rail up out of the way. Hence, clanking.

The usual way to stop the damper pedal is by stopping the damper trap lever, which the pedal moves by pushing up on the pedal rod. I got under the piano and took a look. The stop consisted of a capstan screwed into the case underside. Whenever the pedal was depressed, a piece of felt glued to the top of the lever contacted the capstan, stopping the lever. The capstan made it adjustable, the felt reduced noise. The felt, though, was soft - it was the kind of woven felt used for the hammer rail in an upright. The capstan was quite small, and it had driven a divot into the soft felt, rendering the stop useless.

I thought of simply adjusting the capstan, but I would have had to adjust it quite a bit, which is not a lot of fun to do lying on one's back. The possibilities also existed that the capstan might not have been long enough to fill the gap, and that the felt was now too thin at the contact point to provide any padding. I also thought of simply adding more felt, but the misshapen felt really needed replacing, so I removed the trap lever from the piano.

If there's anyplace where a manufacturer is going to try to save money, it's the trapwork. But this was the most beautifully made trap lever I had ever seen. The coil spring sat in a lovely felt-lined cup, and had a piece of felt carefully woven through it to avoid creaking. The pitman sat on a buckskin/felt cushion inlay, and there was a generous piece of hard leather where the pedal rod made contact. There even was a piece of buckskin wrapped across the bottom and up the side of the lever to protect it from contact with the guide hook. The only flaw was the soft stop felt. What was needed was a chunk of hard felt, like the kind used for hammer heads, and that's what I installed.

The design error was that the felt was too soft for the capstan. If the capstan had been much larger in diameter, and therefore exerting less pressure (pressure = force/surface area), it might have worked. I was actually tempted to remove the capstan and install the traditional stop: a piece of wood glued to the underside of the case, with the hard felt attached to it, and no felt on the lever itself. This works well, and eliminates the possibility of a divot, but it's not as easy to adjust. So I'll have to keep an eye on my new stop felt; this piano gets a lot of use.

How Pianos Are Stolen

2009-01-08T11:55:00.001-05:00

Let's say you're the principal of a junior high school, and in your auditorium is a Steinway grand that was probably bought during the Truman Administration. Let's say it hasn't been maintained in a long time, and no one much uses it. Several generations of kids have carved their names in it, ivories are missing, some notes don't work.

One of your faculty is very excited about putting on a musical production, so, of course, the piano needs tuning, to say the least. You look in the Yellow Pages, and a piano dealer has a big, impressive ad, so you call. They send over a tuner who, it turns out, is a sales rep as well.

The tuner tries his best, snaps a couple of strings, and then announces that the piano really needs a lot of work, which you don't doubt. You're afraid to ask, but you go ahead; "How much work?" "Well, quite a bit," he says, "in fact, it needs a complete rebuilding." "How much will that cost?" you ask nervously. Maybe he tells you right there, or maybe he writes up an appraisal and estimate, but either way the number is uncomfortably close to $12,000. Of course it is out of the question. What will you do?

"Well it just so happens," says the tuner, reading your mind, "we've just finished rebuilding a lovely little grand piano, it's quite nice, and everything works and it's in tune already. Tell you what, we'll make an even trade, the freshly rebuilt grand for this old, run-down grand you have here."

If you say yes, it's a deal, you've just had your piano stolen.

Here's how it works. First, if your piano is a highly valued piano, like a Steinway or a Mason & Hamlin, or even a second-tier piano, like a Baldwin or something unheard of, like a Gabler or a Henry F Miller, then it is pretty valuable, even beat up and needing a ton of work. In other words, it is worth it to have the work done, because the piano will be that much more valuable. A beat-up Steinway can be worth $10,000 because after having another $10,000 of rebuilding work done, it'll be worth more than $20,000. You certainly wouldn't know this by looking at or playing that beat-up piano.

Second, if, as is likely, you couldn't afford $10,000 of rebuilding, chances are you could easily afford a couple of hundred dollars of repair, and that would probably put the piano in perfectly good shape for your musical. But the tuner didn't give you that option, so how would you know?

Third, what do you know about that recently-rebuilt grand? It probably wasn't really rebuilt, just reconditioned, with a few felts replaced, the hammers reshaped, and the pitch raised. Big deal, it's probably a no-name piano worth $3,000 tops.

Get that second opinion before making a decision!

Moving Pianos

2009-01-04T19:34:00.004-05:00

I've moved a lot of pianos. For years I worked with a guy, a big guy, who was brilliant at getting pianos up and down stairs, around corners, through windows and doors. You don't have to be Atlas, but being tall helps. Mostly you have to be smart - there is A Way To Do It, and you go step by step. Patience is a virtue.

Moving a piano does not require a lot of people, as everyone imagines - three people at most, with a fourth to set dollies and open doors. Any more, and they just get in the way. It's also incredibly important that one person give the commands and the others follow. This has to be agreed upon before going any further. Everyone going his own way is a recipe for injury and disaster.

I get asked a lot to help with or supervise a moving, and it's always a tricky matter. It can go like this: twelve guys with bulging muscles show up, prepared to do battle with the piano. I'm a little guy, so they take one look at me, and that's the end of listening to anything I have to say. Then they proceed to argue loudly over how to do this. At this point I walk out, leaving them to their ignorance. Usually, though, because I'm older now and can assert some authority, the helpers will eventually listen, aware that they can really hurt themselves, and then everything goes well. Most of them end up standing around drinking the congratulatory end-of-the-move beer while three of us do the actual moving.

Years ago I helped a friend move a grand piano to his house from the other side of the city. He rounded up an impressive collection of enthusiastic helpers who had really psyched themselves up. I showed up with a moving truck, a couple of ramps, a skid, assorted dollies, blankets, and tools for dismantling the piano. No one had ever seen this done before. They seemed to have a picture in mind that they were going to surround the piano, mightily heave ho, and walk it all the way across Providence. They were fascinated with my approach, but a little disappointed with the lack of drama and sweat. No one refused the beer afterwards, though.

The Piano Paid for Itself

2008-12-30T21:03:00.012-05:00

It's always entertaining to open up a piano and discover things that shouldn't be there. Pens and pencils are pretty much at the top of the list, with paperclips a close second. Grand pianos seem especially prone to swallowing things - the open fallboard is shaped just right to funnel these things down and into the action. Pennies, dimes, and nickels are notorious for finding their way into the spaces between the keys. Rounding out the collection are: playing cards and postcards; pieces of children's toys; bits of candy; crayons; nuts and seeds stored by mice (and their little poops); rubber mutes, small piano parts, and bits of felt and paper and wood left by previous tuners.

Things often show up on the floor of uprights, behind the bottom board. My favorite is the old glass jar that held water a million years ago, meant to humidify the piano. I found a piano with what appeared to be the entire contents of a file cabinet drawer stuffed down there, perhaps by a child delighted to find a slot above the board at the right height that could swallow paper endlessly. Piano tuners sometimes store broken bass strings down there, or other things that they intend to repair some day.

Does anyone know what this is? My customer today handed it to me, having found it somewhere inside her piano. It was in a plastic bag with a few ancient bass strings. This must be what piano tuners do, she had imagined, store their tools inside their customers' pianos. It's a tuning wrench of some sort, quite old it seems, with tuning tips welded at both ends. The tips have square openings, and they are oriented nearly 90 degrees to each other, so it's an offset tuning wrench. But I can't imagine what it would be used for. It would be too awkward for regular tuning - maybe it's for extracting tuning pins after the strings have been removed.

People always want to know if I find money inside pianos. Aside from the aforementioned pennies and dimes, I have been enriched by the occasional quarters I find. But one time I removed the bottom board of a spinet and found a wad of cash, which I handed to the owner. There was just enough money to pay for the tuning.

The End

2008-12-18T16:50:00.004-05:00

When I finish a tuning at a customer's home, I usually run through a bunch of major arpeggios up and down the piano. Then I finish off with a big C11 arpeggio. It's just a habit, but it serves a couple of purposes. First, I'm just "tasting" the piano's tone, now that it's in tune. Second, I'm quickly checking octaves to make sure one or more sections haven't shifted during the tuning. Third, I'm signaling to the customer that I'm done.

Sometimes after I close up the piano, the customer, or, more likely, the customer's child, will sit and play a bit. And I don't know why, but the piano always sounds a little out of tune to me, even though when I played it I was satisfied. Maybe it's because the piano sounds different from a different vantage point, or I'm just paranoid about the quality of my unisons. I've learned to not respond to my apparently distorted perception - I listen to and applaud the child, or marvel at the octogenarian ripping off some ragtime, or sit quietly and write out my bill.

But I do love it when I leave the house, and as I get into my car, I can hear my customer in the house, playing up a storm.

The Only Thing They've Done Wrong

2008-12-17T18:30:00.003-05:00

The dampers in a piano run from the first note up to about the 68th note, the E two octaves above middle C, which is called E6. After that, there really is no need for dampers because the strings don't ring out for very long. Some pianos run dampers 5 or 6 notes above E6, but most piano manufacturers avoid the extra cost and stop at E6 (or try to cut it a bit short one or two notes).

Most of the time you don't notice where the dampers leave off, but a sensitive player will always notice. Sometimes it can be annoying, because the notes just after the last damper can't really be played staccato, and the transition from damper to no-damper is abrupt both for the hand and for the ear.

In an attempt to ameliorate this abrupt transition, Yamaha uses a partial damper felt on its last damper, E6. The idea is that D#6 damps fully, E6 damps partially, and F6 damps not at all - voilà, a smooth transition! Except not really. It's a nice idea, and probably a nice marketing point, but listen carefully to the transition, and you might hear what I'm hearing as the notes die out.

The sound in a piano comes from hammers hitting strings. As soon as a string is struck, it vibrates and transmits most of its energy ultimately to the soundboard, thence to the air as sound waves. As the string gives up its energy, the volume of the sound decreases, a process called decay. Decay begins immediately after the string is struck, and is rapid at first, but then the decay rate drops quickly. In a good piano, the decay rate slows significantly; the string can ring out, at a moderate yet still decreasing volume, for a long time.

Here's my beef with Yamaha's partial damper. D#6, E6, and F6 all have a similar decay, as one would hope. D#6 can also have its sound damped, and F6 cannot. But when you damp E6, only two of the three strings are damped. The third string rings out, but it decays at a significantly different rate than F6. Instead of hearing a smooth transition, I actually hear two different transitions; the one from D#6 to E6, and the one from E6 to F6. Call me sensitive, but it drives me crazy; I'd rather have the one abrupt transition.

The reason the decay is different, by the way, is because a single string transfers energy to the soundboard differently than three strings vibrating in phase. Of course, the difference is greater in the early part of the decay. Towards the end of the decay, the difference is negligible to none. But if you're relying on the damper to do its job, you usually want to apply it in the early part of the decay.

Well, if this is all Yamaha has done wrong, they're doing OK. But I've noticed a growing number of manufacturers mimicking Yamaha's partial damper, and it can't be because it works so well.

Irregular Temperament

2008-12-16T08:12:00.008-05:00

I'm really enjoying tuning the harpsichord over at the University of Rhode Island for their Bach Ensemble. I don't get to tune a non-equal temperament very often. When I first started work there, I asked them what temperament they would like me to use. I had my Jorgensen in hand, ready to roll! But they were so astonished that I was willing to tune it at all, they just said use whatever temperament you want.

The harpsichord was built by Eric Herz, a well-known builder from Boston. No one in the department seems to know exactly how old it is, and I can't find a serial number (though I found a number in chalk on one of the beams underneath). It was apparently one of Herz's earlier ones. It's a small 'chord, one manual, two ranks, very pretty sounding, nice craftsmanship.

So what temperament did I use? Before I name it, I'll tell you where I got it and how it's tuned. I received a call a few years ago from an instrument maker on the West Coast who was building a clavichord for a customer of mine. Apparently my customer was going to have me tune it, so the builder wanted to speak with me. He explained what temperament he was going to use in the design, and gave me a website where I could find instructions.

The easiest way to describe the temperament is by indicating how the fifths should be tuned, which is appropriate for a well temperament (the comma I'm referring to here is the Pythagorean comma):

F - C, C - G, G - D, D - A, A - E (-1/6 comma)
E - B, B - F#, F# - C# (0 comma)
C# - G#, G# - D#, D# - A# (-1/12 comma)
A# - F (+1/12 comma)

The surprise is that last fifth being stretched.

Here's a quick explanation. In Western music, we insist that 12 fifths laid end-to-end will equal 7 octaves. Nature has other ideas, however, and 12 pure fifths is slightly greater than 7 octaves. The difference is called the comma, and the question is, what do we do with it? In equal temperament, we divide it equally among all 12 fifths by shrinking each fifth the same amount, 1/12 of a comma. Tempered thus, the 12 fifths do indeed equal 7 octaves, and the fact that the fifths are shrunk is hardly noticed, or at least we learn to not notice the effect.

So with this temperament, the first 5 fifths are each shrunk twice what they would be in equal temperament. The next 3 fifths are tuned pure. The next 3 fifths are tuned as they would be for equal temperament. If you add up all the tempering at this point, we have overshot the comma by 1/12, so that last fifth is tuned so that it sounds like an equal tempered fifth, but it's stretched.

Now the 12 fifths line up to equal 7 octaves, but the fifths do not sound all the same, as they do in equal temperament. Nor do the thirds all sound alike, or the sixths, or any other intervals. In fact, each of the 12 keys will sound a little different, will have a slightly different "color." It's key color that is missing from equal temperament.

The most famous proponent of well temperament was Johann Sebastian Bach, who wrote an entire series of pieces using all 12 keys (plus 12 more enharmonic keys) called The Well-Tempered Clavier. So which temperament did he use? No one knows, but at least one person claims that the very temperament I've described here is, in fact, old Bach's.

This is a scholarly hornet's nest I'd rather avoid; go visit the website yourself (link below). I've used this temperament on harpsichords, clavichords, and even a piano, and whether or not it's Bach's, it works very nicely - nice key color, no wolf intervals, works in all keys. It's quick and easy to tune once you get the hang of it.

Related websites:
Bradley Lehman's website on temperaments
The PTG's page on Owen Jorgensen

Every Year

2008-12-15T20:05:00.003-05:00

This happens to me every year. As winter approaches, I trade in my light short-sleeved shirts for heavier long-sleeved ones, but with the sleeves rolled up. Then I finally stop rolling up the sleeves. Next thing I know, I'm tuning a piano and as I hit a note with my left hand, I hear an intermittent but unmistakable click. What was that? I try again; no click. Wait, there it is again, what is that? Loose hammerhead? Loose whippen heel?

Duh, it's the button on my shirt cuff hitting against the keytop. I fall for it every year.

The Piano Tuner's Song

2008-12-14T19:43:00.002-05:00

The Piano Tuner's Song is what my teacher at The New England Conservatory, Frank Hanson, used to call the sound of tuning the temperament. Going around the circle of fifths, checking thirds and sixths, makes for an odd but intriguing ditty.

Years ago I went to a customer's house and settled in to tune their console. A young boy, five or six years old, was quite excited to have me there, and he seated himself on the braided rug behind me and listened attentively. It's not unusual, of course, for children to be curious about what's inside a piano, and I usually let them hit the keys to see the whippens and hammers move. They soon run off to play, and I resume. This boy, however, did not approach the piano to look; he stayed quietly seated as I tuned, and for much longer than I expected.

In time, though, he did rise and walk into the kitchen. "Mom," he cried with exasperation, "I don't know what song he's playing!" It seems, I discovered later, that he thought a piano tuner was someone who came to your house to play tunes for you on the piano.

Alloy Electric

2008-12-14T16:42:00.012-05:00

Look at what my pal Chris Warren is up to with old uprights. I have to admit, I was the one who told him how to take a piano apart.

He does this to build an instrument he calls the feedback piano. It consists of the soundboard, strings, and plate of a piano still attached to the case. It's rigged with electronics to take input from the soundboard and also to apply vibration to the soundboard, creating a sustained and controllable feedback when sound is introduced. Check out the video.

Related website:
Alloy Electric

Brittle Strings

2008-12-14T16:36:00.005-05:00

I recently tuned a small Ampico grand, from the late 30's or early 40's I would guess. It had those brittle strings which throw off a lot of high frequencies, making it difficult to tune. I've noticed this before on old Ampico grands, and old Sohmer grands, too. Jewetts are famous for this problem - my heart sinks when I open up a Jewett upright and see all those broken strings in the extreme treble.

The high frequencies tend to cause me to tune the strings a little sharp. Then I struggle to get them back down, a struggle exacerbated by the inevitable rust on the strings and corrosion at the agraffes. When I was done, though, the tuning was fine, but the piano sounded a little harpsichord-ish, except for the tubby bass, all of which is typical.

I've tuned old Chickerings that were older than a century, and I've not had quite the same trouble, even though the strings were plenty brittle. The difference seems to be that on the Chickering, the string tension is much lower. I've also tuned pianos as old as the Ampico but whose strings were not nearly as brittle. The strings that tend toward premature brittleness must be of a different composition. Even the rust on them looks a little different.

Increased brittleness in strings is a natural consequence of age. The strings, which are under constant tension for decades, actually change their molecular structure over time. The atoms creep and shift, relieving some of the stress. This is the string "stretching out," something it does for its whole existence. The string becomes less springy, more brittle, more liable to break, more likely to throw off false beats. The fundamental frequency weakens, making the string sound tinny, and the string's overtones probably become more inharmonic because of the increased stiffness. I think that's what fools my ear when I tune.

A few things to bear in mind when tuning a piano like the little Ampico. Be very careful about raising pitch - you don't need to overshoot A440 much because there's not much stretch left in the strings, and I don't recommend raising more than 100 cents without letting the strings rest. Expect false beats - don't mess too much with unisons, it'll be easier to touch them up later after the strings have rested a little. Finally, you'll notice that the brittleness increases as you move up the piano, perhaps because the strings are thinnner. That's why in a Jewett you'll see all those broken and replaced strings up there.

Related websites:
There does seem to be controversy and confusion about exactly what happens to piano wire under tension over time. There are several ways that strings "stretch out," but the mechanism I'm referring to is creep embrittlement.
See Wikipedia on:
Deformation of materials
Material strength and toughness (including steel)
Dislocation within crystal structures

Emergency!

2008-12-08T15:55:00.004-05:00

A friend teased me once about the announcement on my answering machine. The announcement asks callers to let me know if they are calling about a "piano emergency," so that I will know to call back ASAP. My friend thought "piano emergency" was hilariously over-dramatic.

Most "piano emergencies" come about because of a scheduled performance - something goes wrong, or somebody drops the ball on calling the tuner. This was the case with my caller on Friday afternoon. There was a concert scheduled for Sunday afternoon. They were going to use a keyboard, but at the last minute discovered that one of the singers will not perform with a keyboard, she will only sing with a real piano. So they rounded up a piano from someone's home, and then realized it needed tuning.

I hesitated to commit - I had already committed to a musical gathering that night in Connecticut, and I knew I wouldn't get home until 2 AM. On Saturday I was to perform with my band, again in Connecticut (90 minutes away), and I had to be there early for soundcheck and a bit of rehearsal. It would be another 2 AM bedtime, and my caller's gig was for early Sunday afternoon.

But I knew about the concert, knew some of the people involved, knew it could make good connections for me, it was nearby, I needed the money, so I said yes, and shoe-horned it into my schedule.

Late Saturday morning, she called to cancel. She explained, with apologies, that someone else had also been calling tuners for the show, and now they were double-booked. I was off the hook. That was fine by me, but I wonder why I got booted, and not the other guy. Maybe because the person who called me was a woman, and the person who made the other appointment was a man. Of course his appointment would stay, she would have to cancel hers, it would go without saying.

But at least we were all civil and pleasant and agreeable, that's the least we can hope for, and the goodwill will pay off one way or another.