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Piano Funny

admin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 21:16:38 +0000

Ok this just made me laugh out loud. Truly a “beginner” model piano. Enjoy!

Piano Friction “Weight”

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:40:22 +0000

So… it was a graph that was bothering me… i couldn’t let it go. I was looking at data from a recent piano where the hammer weight was sloped (as it should be – there are larger hammer in the lower notes of a piano and small ones in the top) and what i found to be interesting was that the frictional component was also sloped. Why would that be? But there was no more time for today…I locked the door, closed the shop for the weekend. But it was on my mind. According to the stats, i needed to reduce about 3-5 grams of friction in the lower hammers. Then i got to thinkin’… what would happen if you had a wagon that was empty versus one that was full. The coefficient of friction would remain the same – meaning that the percent or ratio of friction would be the same – but the load would actually change the ‘weight’ of friction. Thinking again about the wagon… if it was empty it would be quite easy to move right? Load it full of bricks and all of a sudden, the force required to move the wagon increased proportional to the load. So in essence, the ratio doesn’t change but the weight of friction will change with the load. Back to the piano – the hammers i measured were slightly heavy… too heavy in fact for this piano. I referenced my graph again… i was examining the weight of friction and not the coefficient of friction. After i did many checks and balances again on certain joints, i finally did the reduction of weight which you can see the article on entitled Hammer Shaping. What gave me a tickle though was the fact that with the load reduced, so also the friction reduced by the exact amount i needed – a few grams.

PS… don’t know whether the coefficient of friction changes when the friction becomes the kids fighting… i remember those days all too well

Piano Touch Weight

admin — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 22:23:31 +0000

When you ask a child to draw a picture of a car, invariably it looks like this – wheels (with spokes hahaa), windows (again with panes lol) and exhaust. Much is the same when we think of pianos – black and white keys as well as strings and hammers. Everything in between magically gets glossed over. But it’s in the attention to such details that make a piano go from just ho-hum to exceptional. There are times that you sit at a piano and it REALLY responds. That piano makes you not only sound good but it also makes you want to play MORE! That’s because someone somewhere in the world has connected the dots from keyboard to string. More accurately, that’s the evolution of many hands spanning 200 years or more with the inception of keyboard instruments. It’s naive to say that one person designed the car as we know it today… so too many people have been involved over the years with the development of the piano.

But there are four basic elements from which we derive “good” touch at the piano. They all must be in check for a piano to function. And they are:

Down weight

Up weight

Friction

Action ratio

The down weight refers to the pressure required to press down a key on a piano. The up weight is the weight needed to bring the piano key back to resting position. Friction is the perceived weight on all the joint and moving parts while the action ratio is the lever system (called whippen assembly) that multiplies the speed, weight and force of the hammer from the key.
So… in my curious nature, i start asking questions. Why do we need friction? It’s not that we NEED friction but too little of it, and parts are usually too loose and will start producing noise. Too much of it (as on the Chickering grand i just worked on) and the touch feels too heavy. Concert instruments should range between 50 and 55 grams of touch with friction representing 10-15 grams of that touch weight. With too much friction, the piano i just worked on clocked in at just over 80 grams of touch – completely unreasonable for normal playing. Question 2 – well… why not just counterbalance the touch using weights in the keys? If you’ll notice on the sides of your piano keys there are small circular weights made out of lead. Well the lead weights will have some effect for the initial movement of the hammer but in dynamic playing those lead weights will not compensate for rotational inertia at all. Nor will they do any good for either friction or up weight. So why not then just have really light parts and light friction? Good idea but… the speed of the key is also determined by the return… the return requires weight.
The balance then is this – 2 elements of the four are relatively easy to control while 2 are not. The action ratio – the intrinsic design of the piano – not so easy. That’s like saying “Can we just change the pistons on this engine?” Not easily. The second part is the up weight. The up weight carries direct correlation to the hammer weight alone. The other two factors – friction and down weight can be readily altered. Friction is by far the biggest culprit that i’ve seen. And down weight can be counterbalanced with the aforementioned weights. Once the balance is achieved however, the piano becomes a wonderful and inspiring instrument. Below are two pics of lead weighting this last week – some tools of the trade and different lead weights across the keyboard ready to be installed.

Horizontally Laminated Bridges

admin — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 15:56:39 +0000

I will go to my grave arguing that horizontally laminated bridges are the WORST thing possible on a piano. Sometimes my blog is informative while today i just need to rant. Yesterday i tuned a brand new piano (which will remain nameless) and i thought to myself – i’ve tuned pianos that are 100 years old that are better than this #$%!@#. What is WRONG with this piano???? So i guess a wee bit more description would help: It was a continental style upright. Continental means it has no front legs and is rather narrow front to back. Rather narrow usually means short key sticks. Short key sticks means it usually doesn’t feel very balanced. Check mark. Then i noticed that the dampers were lifting AHEAD of the hammers. WHAT???? The damper blocks dampen the sound and should be removed from the strings about halfway through the key stroke. Instead, they were lifting BEFORE the hammers were even moving. Ridiculous! In addition to lifting at the wrong time, the damper springs were so heavy that it made any kind of delicate playing impossible. OK wait… there’s more. So about 2 octaves above middle C, the tone just decided to take a left turn and sound like a tin can on steroids. But the Pièce de résistance in this piano was the lack of sustain. I took one look at the bridge (pictured) and added it to my list of bad pianos of all time. I have NEVER NEVER NEVER played a piano regardless of name brand that has a horizontally laminated bridge. WHY? Because sound will not travel through 14 layers of glue. FOURTEEN!?? Yep. Fourteen. I counted.
So if you have no idea what i’m talking about, a bridge (like that on a guitar) is the part on the piano where the strings transfer energy to the soundboard. If you look at the picture, you’ll see the strings crossing over the bridge pins onto this piece of wood. In this cheap piano, they made it out of layers and layers of glue… errr i mean wood. It is my experience that bad bridges are bad for business. The pianos ALWAYS sound terrible.
Now i understand the need for cost effective manufacturing and maybe this is my ignorance in woodworking but if you need to make a cheap bridge, why not turn it 90 degrees and do a vertically laminated bridge so that the sound is running down the individual strips of wood? The big boys (those who build $100,000 plus pianos) usually have a solid one piece with a cap for structural integrity resulting in great transference but also crazy costs. But i’ve also played really great pianos with 5 ply vertically laminated bridges. That is my guess at why i can play a 100 year old Bechstein that sounds wonderful (on today’s list of tunings) and why this piano that is brand new plays like dirt. Manufacturers need to wake up and realize that if there are corners to be cut, tone is not one of them. This week a piano tech said to me “The road to hell is paved with shortcuts”. Truly this is one of them.

Hammer Shaping

admin — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:59:01 +0000

Recently i’ve had the opportunity to work on a church piano – an older Chickering. But i must say, this piano was an interesting one to tame. I use the word tame because it was out of control. The touch was not only uneven but INCREDIBLY difficult to play. Most fine pianos have a touch weight of about 50-55ish grams of weight at the key. This one was a whopping 80+ !!! First things first… chase down the friction. That blog will be for another day though. After friction was in the ballpark, i was still faced with a piano that had a touch of 65ish grams. Time to consider putting this piano on a diet. Yep. You heard me. This piano was overweight and i was about to transform the touch.
So where does weight come from? Many months ago i wrote a blog on piano weights. It can simply (and yet so difficult at the same time) be measured in 2 forms – static weight where we are doing a dead lift – the hammer has yet to move. The other is created by rotational inertia. The hammer has started to move… how much effort is required to continue to move the mass of the hammer. The former mainly deals with soft playing… we’re not concerned about velocity but simply getting the hammer in motion. The latter however deals with everything above soft playing and truly is the more important factor. Static weight can be counterbalanced in the key like a see-saw. Rotational inertia however can really only be changed through the mass of the hammer itself. Because static weight again really only affects soft playing, when i sat and just played the piano (after friction was removed), it still felt heavy and burdensome. So it was time to trim the fat – reduce what i could on the hammer without compromising either structural integrity or tone. How does one leave the strike point of a hammer the same and yet reduce dead weight? Take a look at the pics. The one on the left is the original. Square and bulky. The one on the right – the more parabolic shaped one is one i adjusted. The tapered ‘shoulders’ of the hammer offer insignificant contribution to tone… if any. And so i spent the next 3 hours shaping hammers. Take a look at the two ‘tails’ – the end parts of the hammer. On the left – one that is tapered while the right, original. The net result? Reduction in about 1.3-1.5 grams of fat. One point three??? Perspective here… a nickel weighs 5 grams. You ask “How does anyone get excited about 1.3 grams of weight?” Ahhh therein lies the magic. Every piano has an ‘action ratio’ meaning one gram at the hammer accounts for usually around 5 grams at the keyboard. OK so do the math… this piano has a 5.5 action ration. 1.3 gram reduction x 5.5 action = 7.1 gram reduction of touch weight – the exact amount i needed to make this piano feel dynamic and alive. I’m so happy!

Piano on an Outside Wall?

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:15:09 +0000

This week i’m refinishing an old upright. One that was made in 1917. When this piano was built, houses were not the same as we know them today. Today we have insulation, modern heating capabilities of gas furnaces, baseboards and even oil heaters. Interesting because nearly 90 years after this piano was built, i can just hear the salesman of this piano when it was new out of the factory “And be sure you don’t put the piano on an outside wall”. I came from the prairies… in the prairies, the ice on those old farmhouses in 1917 would have been about as thick on the inside wall as the outside. Without insulation, the wood stoves and fireplaces put out incredibly dry heat. If you put a piano on an outside wall back then, you ran the risk of exposing the piano to fluctuation in temperature and humidity. The cold would come right through those thin uninsulated walls and by day the room would heat up with the old stoves. Back and forth the contraction and expansion would happen on the soundboard. The safer bet would be to put the piano on an inside wall where there was less fluctuation. It wouldn’t cool down like the outside walls.
OK fast forward to the 2012… construction of buildings now have insulation minimums. The walls have are thicker and more resiliant to temperature. So when people ask today if they should house the piano on the outside wall, my litmus test is “If you can touch your wall and it feels close to room temperature, you’re fine”. That dispells many of the myths of why pianos should or shouldn’t be on an outside wall.

Piano Music… novelty?

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:25:17 +0000

Written in 1923, this incredibly catchy song was one i grew up both listening to and playing. Recently my youngest son was sniffing around for some new music. I played a few bars of this from memory and his eyes lit up. Edward Elzear aka “Zez” Confrey wrote what was called ‘novelty’ piano music. In later years, he composed more for jazz band. What i didn’t know however was that he only died in 1971 with quite a career in composition. His other famous song was entitled “Kitten on the keys”. If you need a challenge for more advanced students… let them loose on Dizzy Fingers. It’s a musical tongue twister and is supposed to be performed at break neck speed.

BTW, you can still order it online and have it shipped to your door which is what i did.

Without further adieu… here it is performed by none other than Liberace. He embelishes the ending but is still a wonderful performance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Piano Names

admin — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:32:28 +0000

What’s in a name? Funny you should ask. From names we derive culture, history and even fads. Think about famous names such as Lincoln, Rockefeller, Ford, even Bill Gates. These all come packaged with history, with credibility. Their names have outgrown them to an iconic state. Package names with products and you all of a sudden transfer that credibility to the product. When IBM or Sony buys up a new product and brands it, all of a sudden it has credibility.
Enter the piano market. The name Steigerman was a Yamaha invented name in the 1970′s: “Stei” from Steinway and “german”… trying to sound German. At the last China music trade show, it struck me how many names were trying to cash in on credibility. The piano that started my gears turning was one named Beethoven. Of course all of the composers have been done… i’ve seen Schubert, Mozart, Strauss. And so “obviously” one would assume that pianos with composer’s names should be musical right? WRONG. I can’t STAND Mozart pianos. Jes sayin’. They’re terrible. I can say that because they’re no longer in business. hahaa. But now we see names like Romance, Grammy… really? do they think their piano is award winning? And romance?
But now we’ve entered the more subtle means of marketing… where big fish swallow up small fish and trade the name. For example, Yamaha purchased the godfather Bosendorfer! Baldwin bought Chickering. Samick owns Knabe. We could spend a day talking about acquisitions and who owns what names. To me it all comes down to ownership. The ownership of the company will also speak to the future direction of the piano manufacturing. There are some really big shake ups that are in the wind… ones that will affect the industry as we know it today. But that’s the ebb and flow of business. My rule of thumb, stick to companies that put their own name on the front.

A Piano That Can’t Be Tuned?

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:15:16 +0000

There are two thoughts that resonate in my brain when someone says “A tuner once said it couldn’t be tuned”. The first thought is “hmmmm here’s a challenge” and my second thought is “lazy”. Lazy? Lazy?? Yep… you heard me. I’ve run into this many times where a piano is so badly out of tune that tuners don’t want to bring it up to pitch. Why? Because it will require multiple tunings and probably string breakage… the piano is usually old and frustrating to work on. Au contraire pour moi. I enjoy the challenge. It’s kinda like washing your car when it’s really dirty and you have a better sense of satisfaction when you’re done cleaning it. Tuning a piano that’s really out of tune is quite satisfying for me. I find that i enjoy bringing it back to life – to the original sound that it was intended to make. Y’see… individual notes are meant for a specific pitch. The gauge of wire corresponds with the pitch of the note. Subsequently, when a piano has slidden down terribly in pitch, it resembles sound more akin to a steamship than a piano! This last week i had such a case. The piano is called a Sterndale. From outward cabinetry i would date this piano at about 1880-1890. Though the name sounds English, directly below you’ll see the word “Berlin”. I must say that Germany really is known for engineering and when i took a quick look at the inside structure, i thought that immediately that this piano has potential (contrary to the aforementioned words of “can’t be tuned”). I put on my strobe to find out exactly how far down we’re talkin’. UGH! 150-200 cents down! It beat my previous record of 110 cents down. Just to give some perspective, a piano on average will slide between 3-5 cents per year… so… 200??? Exactly. You do the math and think that this piano hasn’t been tuned in awhile. In fact, inside i saw a tuner’s signature in 1923. I laughed and thought… “y’know… this may have been the last time” hahaa. Anyway… 3 tunings later and one broken string and VOILA! The metamorphosis happened! This turned into my second favorite old piano (first being an old Steinway i tune regularly). Tightening down flange screws, taking out lost motion, adjusting front pins and damper heads and i must say… what an incredible instrument. So the next time you hear those words “Can’t be tuned”… think again. It’s amazing what a little time and TLC can do.

Should Piano Tuners be Piano Players?

admin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:44:32 +0000

Is it necessary that a piano tuner know how to get around on the piano? No. Piano tuners can competantly tune an instrument one note at a time. HOWEVER, that said, it is an INCREDIBLE asset to know how to play to CHECK the tuning. My background is in performance and teaching. I started tuning only about 10 years ago. When i first started tuning i would then play a favourite song and say to myself “BLECH… this is TERRIBLE!” hahaaa. Then off i would go fixing what sounded ‘out’. For a brief period in college i studied ancient Greek language. The first 3 rules of interpretation are… context, context, context. Similarly when tuning, the context of a note within a chord reveal pitch. I’ve spoken about how some notes on certain pianos don’t sound ‘right’ and you can alter them to sound more…mmmm soothing instead of jarring or clashing. And the way in which you tell if a piano sounds in tune is from playing a song, an arpeggio, a chord or melody. So is it necessary to play if you’re a tuner? Absolutely not. Anyone can play 2 notes at a time. But is imperative to check the tuning? Absolutely.