Piano Video Lesson: How to Make Your Piano Sound Its Best

You're watching LivingPianos.com and I'm Robert Estrin. And this is a really important subject for any of you who own pianos.

How to make your piano sound its best.

Many of you know that Living Pianos started in 2006 as the world's first online piano store.

And we've sold hundreds of pianos, if not thousands over the years.

And every single piano is a project, getting it to sound its best. So I thought I'd share some tips with you.

I sometimes describe prepping a piano, that is preparing a piano, as one definition of infinity. Going halfway again, and again, and again to perfection without ever reaching it. Of course, you can try to get as close as you can, and then maintaining it at that level is a challenge in itself. But I'm going to tell you, what are the things that you can do? Now first of all, you must assume, we must assume, that your piano's parts are not worn out. If you have a piano with rusty strings that are lifeless, you're not going to get a great sound.

There's some techniques you might be able to get better sound out of bass strings by twisting them, cleaning them, and things of that nature.

And if your hammers are worn out, there's only so much you can do if you don't have the felt to work with. So I'm going to make the assumption that your piano isn't worn out, and there are no major problems. You don't have cracks in the soundboard, or bridges that are cracked.

You don't have problems, because obviously, that's going to make your piano sound a heck of a lot better if you take care of any issues you have with your piano. But even brand new pianos don't come new out of the box, anywhere close to their potential.

If you ever go to a piano store and you're shopping for a piano, and say, oh, we'll give you one new in the box, run. You don't want that. It's up to the dealers to do the prep, and you can actually do days of work on a piano, depending upon how far you want to go with it. Naturally, most dealers are not going to spend that kind of time. It's very expensive and time consuming. They're not going to do that with the vast majority of their pianos, maybe only the really special ones. Now here, we're different. We're more of a boutique store, and we have only top -tier pianos, or primarily top -tier pianos, and we do go the extra mile on all of them. But that's not the norm. So I'm going to tell you what you can do with your piano to make it sound its best.

So naturally, tuning your piano on a regular basis is the first step, because the more you tune your piano, the less you need to tune it. That sounds crazy, right? Well, it's true, because if you tune your piano a lot, it becomes so stable that it almost doesn't go out of tune. But if you neglect the tuning for a number of years, then the next tuning won't hold very long, so you want to get ahead of the curve. Now there are many other techniques that can enhance the tone and the playing of your piano.

Regulation has to do with the several adjustments that are done on each key. The key height. If you've ever seen a piano where the keys are not all the same height, obviously you're not going to be able to play smoothly, a smooth melodic line if some keys are higher than others.

That's key height. Now then there's a key dip. Push your keys down. They should all go down the same amount, right? That's really pretty darn important. If they don't, then how can you possibly get consistent sound? There's a letoff. If you look inside on a grand piano, you'll see that the hammers let off the string, and they should let off at the same amount of distance so you get consistent performance. And there are other things that have adjustments, about half a dozen adjustments on each key of a piano. So regulation is a pretty involved process.

But then there's also voicing of your piano.

The shape of the hammer and the hardness of each hammer. Getting them to generally be the right hardness to produce a warm or bright sound, or the amount of brightness that you like in all registers, and evenness from key to key, is an arduous task that few piano technicians know how to do. When we first moved from California to Cleveland, it took a while for us to find top -notch skilled technicians who are on that master level who can perform that kind of work.

Seek out somebody who maybe tunes for your local symphony or concert hall, because very few piano technicians really know how to do that kind of meticulous work. But man, the difference it can make, you can't even believe. Even if you brought a brand new Steinway or Bechstein or Mason and Hamlin, that piano can be improved dramatically from the way it comes new out of the factory.

What else is there? Well, there's things like string leveling.

Well, you can get meticulous. If the hammer hits the strings and some strings are slightly higher than others, then the hammer's not going to make contact with all the strings equally, and so you're not going to get the same attack and sustain. So each string can be leveled so the hammer can be shaped to impact all three strings at exactly the same time.

There's also damper regulation. When you play a chord on the piano and then you release it slowly with a damper, you want a smooth release. Sometimes you'll get kind of funny noises if your damper felt's too hard. You may need new damper felt in order to get clean releases. At the end of a beautiful slow movement, you may want to fade out the sound of a chord, and the only way to do that is to release the pedal gradually, even during a piece of music.

If it's, for example, a piece of Debussy, you might want to have nuances of half -pedaling, and if those dampers are hard or they're not regulated properly, you're not going to get consistency in the sound.

There are many, many other things that can be done to enhance the sound. One of them is string termination.

Yes, the strings have to terminate on either end of the part of the string that produces the sound, the speaking length of the string. Now, at that point where the string meets metal, you want it to be a clean place. Now, for example, when you keep playing your piano, the hammers are hitting the strings, and they might elevate just a fraction of an inch, and if it's not a clean termination at the points where they meet the bridge, how can it possibly transfer the sound appropriately to the soundboard? It can't. Tapping the strings down at all the points of termination on the bridges can really enhance the sound. Now, keep in mind that if you do that, you'll have to tune your piano, but sometimes if you've never done this on your piano and you've played your piano and you're a strong player, it probably will make a big difference in getting more tone life, because if you don't get good, solid, clean termination of the strings, how can you possibly get consistency from note to note? Some notes will sustain longer than others.

So these are just some of the things. Now, there's also the pedal, you know, the damper. I talked about the damper regulation, but what about the una corda, the soft pedal? You notice that the action moves from side to side. It's a different part of the hammer that impacts the strings, and yes, you can actually voice the una corda, voicing that part of the hammer that comes in contact with the strings when you depress the una corda pedal.

The middle pedal, the sostenuto pedal, also you have to make sure that that's adjusted properly, so it only holds the note you want it to hold. And you know, there's a host of other things that can be done to enhance the sound of a piano, and sometimes it's different on different pianos. There's unique challenges with different pianos that you have to take into account.

So these are just some of the common things that we do to pianos, and then you can consider doing to your piano if you can find a high level piano technician, it can make a world of difference in the sound of a piano. And I work closely with our technicians going back again and again. Sometimes, for example, the last octave.

You hear all of those have a nice singing sound, a clear sound that rings. Sometimes you get to a certain note and it'll almost sound like a wooden sound, like a tapping sound instead of a nice pitched sound. And that's because of what's called strike point.

The hammer has so little string up there, the string is so short that the hammer might not be hitting the string exactly, it could be hitting where the string meets the bridge. And it's not making a clean attack on the part of the string, once again the speaking length of the string. And the hammer has to be adjusted ever so slightly, or sometimes the entire action with the cheek blocks can be adjusted to move in or out just slightly. So the hammers are hitting exactly the point of the string that they should be hitting.

Did I mention hammer alignment? Oh man, it just goes on and I keep thinking of more and more things. Hammer alignment, the hammers have to strike exactly center with the strings. And you know, they might not be perfectly aligned, each hammer has to be aligned so it's hitting the strings exactly in the center where it's supposed to hit.

These are so many techniques and if I talk to my piano technicians I could probably tell you more, but I've probably given you a whole lot to think about and hopefully you have a piano technician who could take your piano to the next level. Let me know what works for you and once again I'm Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com, your online piano store, your online piano resource. We're here for you, thanks for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-make-your-piano-sound-its-best/

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