Piano Video Lesson: How to Maintain Your Piano in Different Environments

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin and today the subject is how to maintain pianos in different environments.

Man, we have sold pianos to people all over the world, from China to Singapore, all over the place, and just around here there's different environments. When we're in California, you just go an hour and a half away, you're in the desert, or an hour and a half in a different direction, you're in the mountains with snow, and the beach, it's all different environments. And you wonder, how can you possibly maintain pianos in all these different environments? Well, I'm going to give you some tips today to help you, whatever environment you're in, I'm going to try to cover it. And you're welcome to visit LivingPianos .com and the comments here on YouTube because you'll get stories from all kinds of other people who face the same issue.

So we're going to talk about two aspects of maintaining your piano.

Of course, the most important one is the physical environment and the toll that may take on your piano. But also we're going to talk a little bit about the acoustic properties of the space where the piano is because that also enters into maintaining the instrument, and I'll explain how in just a moment.

So you have really pianos, what do pianos really love? They love what you love. They want to be in a place that's not too humid, not too dry, not too hot, not too cold, and pretty stable. Boom, done. Okay, end of video. Well, not quite because there's a lot more to this because some people don't have the luxury of those choices.

You live on the beach and this ocean waves, a beautiful sound and the smell of that air. But you also, piano's very important to you. What are you going to do? Close off your living room and use air conditioning and not smell that beautiful ocean air? Of course not. There are compromises that you have to make in life and sadly your piano may suffer somewhat. But even in a beach environment, there are simple things you can do to help mitigate the humidity. Now I will say that the humidity will take its toll on a piano at the beach. But if you simply close your piano, particularly at night when that night moist air, the marine layer comes in, you can even consider getting a cover for your piano.

So if your piano is completely closed and covered when you're not playing it, or at least at night, that will really help to minimize the humidity that is going to affect the strings and other parts of the instrument.

Another thing you can consider is a string cover.

You can get a felt cover cut to the exact shape of the inside of the piano.

And interestingly, it doesn't really affect the sound. You think it would, but the sound goes right through the thin felt. But it will help to protect from the humidity.

So really, as far as underneath the piano, moisture for the soundboard isn't really going to hurt the soundboard. We'll get to how dryness affects the soundboard in a minute, but it's really the top of the piano with the moisture will affect the strings and all the metal parts will tarnish. Not only that, but man, I remember as a kid in my father's studio before he had air conditioning, man, in the summertime, the whole piano becomes sluggish because all those moving parts on each key have felt bushings which would absorb moisture. So it would feel slow and it would even affect the sound because the hammers absorb moisture and you get a less brilliant sound, kind of a thuddy sound. It was just a mess.

So putting a string cover in will not just help to protect the metal parts of the piano from tarnishing or rusting, but it will also help the action from gumming up and giving a dull, lifeless sound.

There are other technologies that come to bear. For example, something called the damp chaser system. The damp chaser or piano lifesaver are heating rods that usually go under the piano, but sometimes in extreme environments, rods can actually be fit inside the piano. And the way it works is there's a humidistat. Just like your thermostat measures the temperature of the air, humidistat measures the humidity level of the air and once it gets above a certain level, the heating rods will turn on and that heat will help to mitigate the moisture.

These are all good techniques for helping to deal with excessive humidity. Now we're going to flip it and we're going to talk about excessive dryness. Even though the humidity is a real pain and can really destroy a piano, excessive dry air can be even more deadly to the longevity of your piano because the wood dries out and wood joints can crack, the glue dries out. It could be a nightmare if, for example, people living in the desert or even living in a temperate climate, if you notice how dry it gets, if you have hot air, heat, not so much with radiators, but the hot air blows and if you don't have a humidification system built into your central heating system, it can get really, really, really dry. Here's a good example of that. We first moved to Cleveland just about two and a half years ago and one of the first things I did was I was looking for a piano for this studio because getting up the stairs and nothing would really fit. We finally got this Steinway up here by actually having somebody weld the door frame off anyway. It was a crazy thing, but at first I thought, let me just get a piano to fit up here and I found a Chickering Quarter Grand. So some pianos have different sized cheek blocks and the Chickering Quarter Grand has such thin cheek blocks that the piano could make it up the stairs without doing surgery, which eventually we did in order to get the Steinway up here because my sister and I traded pianos. She now has my father's SF -10 7 -foot Baldwin, which would not only not fit up here, but it would blow you out of this room and I've got this beautiful Steinway Baby Grand and we're all happy.

But when I first went out, I was looking for specifically a Chickering Quarter Grand knowing that it would fit up the stairs and sure enough, not far from here, I found one and it was not very old, it was from the 1970s. I looked at it, it looked fine, but you know what? I played that piano and it was drastically out of tune. The pin block had dried out and the piano couldn't hold tuning anymore and that's not that old for a piano. We've had 50, even 100 -year -old pianos with good tuning stability, but the dry environment here in Cleveland was too much for it and that's after living in Arizona where you have single -digit humidity and it wasn't as bad there as what the dry heat, the hot air heat, can do to a piano.

So what can you do about the dryness? Well, simply humidification systems. Best off having a whole house system or a room humidifier and try to keep it around 48%, 50%, 45%. That's ideal if you're in the 30s or in the 60s, you're still okay, but when you get down to single -digit humidity, that is a problem.

And what else can you do? Well, I mentioned the damp chaser system. They actually have a humidity adding system as well. There's a tank that you fill with water and whenever the humidity level gets too low, it adds humidity underneath the piano to the soundboard, which is the critical place because if the soundboard gets too dry and cracks, you've got a rebuild on your hands. There's no real way to fix a soundboard without pulling the plate and restringing and it's talking about easily tens of thousands of dollars because once you're doing that, you're going to do a lot more to the piano when it's all part like that. So a damp chaser system, and you can get one by the way if you're living in a place that the summers are excessively humid and the winters are really dry, you can get a dual system that engages whichever the heating rods when it gets too humid or the water tank when it gets too dry. So those are some things you can do. You know that if it's too dry, some people will put like a tray of water under their piano just for the evaporative effect.

Believe it or not, just filling your room with a bunch of plants is going to add to the humidity of your environment quite a bit, particularly if you don't have hot air blowing, if you just have radiators or baseboard heating, that might just do the trick to bring it up a few percentage points.

So I talked about the environment. Now the sun beating on your piano is another big problem.

It's possible it could be inside the piano and affect the tuning, but just hitting the case of the piano, I've seen pianos six months, nine months sitting in a room where the sun would hit the piano part of the day, and the telltale side is the two -tone lid. You know, you have your piano lid folded over, but then you unfold it and you see that the part that was not folded is darker and that tail of the piano that doesn't have the fly lid over it is lighter. And this can happen and it doesn't take very long. Now you could try window treatment, that will help somewhat, but really you really need to just close your shades or curtains when the piano is being subjected to the direct sunlight. If you touch your piano and it's warm to the touch, your finish is going to be damaged. After many years of that, your piano will check.

Checking is when you get that alligatored look, the finish dries out and there's no way to deal with that other than stripping everything and refinishing. Again, a hugely expensive endeavor. So you want to avoid all that.

Now the other thing I mentioned early on was the environment your piano is in in regards to the sound. Acoustics are so important. And if you have a piano, for example, that the room is really dead and you're pounding it to be able to be heard, you're going to wear out your piano and you're not going to enjoy playing very much. Now what can you do about that? Well, short of removing furniture, soft furniture and curtains, you can actually just put something hard under the piano, like even a sheet of plexiglass if you've got a pretty rug and you don't want to ruin the look. Something that will reflect the sound because you know that about half the sound of a piano comes from underneath. So something that reflects the sound will help. Having your piano open so it projects into the room will help. How you place your piano so it's open to the room instead of open to a wall will also help to get more sound out of your piano.

Now, of course, the flip side of that is if your piano is making you hurt your ears and you're of course you can close your piano and that will certainly help. Putting your piano on a rug if you have hardwood floors will absorb a lot of the sound because as I mentioned, half the sound is coming out of the bottom. Try putting your piano on a rug. If that doesn't help, try putting soft furniture and thick drapes in your room. Anything that will absorb the sound is going to help.

You can even hang tapestries on the wall. So these are ways that will actually help you enjoy your piano more and help the longevity. You don't want to be having your piano pounded when you can't hear it enough or having to put your pussy foot on it and never enjoying the sound of the instrument. Worse yet, sometimes people will have their hammers needled to bring the voicing way down just so it's not too loud and you don't get that nice rich tone anymore. You don't want to compromise the voicing of your piano just to accommodate room acoustic problems. So these are all the things you can do to maintain a good environment for your piano both for the structural integrity as well as the enjoyment of playing your piano. If you've got any other tips, leave them here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube on the comments. And again, thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin, LivingPianos .com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-maintain-your-piano-in-different-environments/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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