Piano Video Lesson: How to Care For Your Piano

I'm Robert Estrin, you're watching LivingPianos.com. Today we're going to talk about how to care for your piano.

You know, if you've got a nice instrument, you want it to last a long time, not only that, you want it to play well for you on a regular basis.

And there's some simple tips I can give you today that will really help you to extend the life of your piano and also make it play better for the time you own it.

The first thing is the environment your piano is in.

It's vital to provide a stable environment in regards to temperature and humidity for your piano. Now, I tell people it's really pretty simple. If it's a place you would be comfortable sitting day in, day out, your piano's going to do great.

Now, excessive humidity takes its toll on the piano. The strings can rust, the action becomes sluggish because wherever there's friction there's felt bushings and those felt bushings can absorb moisture and as a result it gums up and everything becomes slow and it's really not fun to play. Now, the flip side where if you have a really dry environment, let's say you have a home with forced hot air. Worse yet, if the hot air vents under your piano, it could actually dry out the soundboard and crack it and you could destroy your piano and it could need tens of thousands of dollars of work to get to the soundboard to either replace it or repair it. So, you really want a median type of humidity in the 45 to 50 percent range. Ideally, if you get down to single digits or up to the 85, 90 percent, you'll have problems over time. So, care for your piano also with the temperature. If you have big swings of temperature, it'll affect the tuning stability so you don't really save money because you're going to have to spend more money tuning your piano more often.

So that's the environment and that's a really important part.

Equally important is the maintenance of your piano. I can't tell you how many times people contact us and they say, oh, I've got a piano, it's perfect, it just needs tuned. Well, what are you talking about? Well, they have a piano they haven't tuned in 10 years and it's like if you had a car and you hadn't changed the oil in 10 years, well, I haven't driven it, doesn't matter. Just like I haven't played my piano in years so I didn't tune it. Well, guess what? Your piano is not going to be the same, it's going to take major work and it's possible that the piano might start breaking strings, who knows, it can be really tough.

So, maintaining your piano on a regular basis, what does that really mean? Well, the Piano Technicians Guild recommends four tunings a year and that's a good number now. Believe it or not, some people should tune their pianos even more than that. My father in his studio, he had two grand pianos and because he taught on the pianos and practiced on them, he had them tuned every month. You might think that's excessive but you know what? The more you play a piano, the more it goes out of tune. Think about it. You go to a show and there's a guitar player, what are they doing between each number? They're tuning it up again, right? Well, you've got somewhere between 220 to 240 strings on a piano. In a perfect world, your piano would be tuned every day at least and keep it perfect but of course that's not practical. Four times a year is a good amount for most people and the real minimum is twice a year. Why twice a year? Well, when you go from heat to air conditioning and then back again later in the season, the piano can shift and interestingly it might sound okay but the whole piano might lose pitch. Sometimes a piano can even go higher than pitch and the secret to keeping your piano in tune is keeping it as stable as possible. The more you tune a piano, the longer it will hold its tuning but a piano that hasn't tuned in a long time, the next tuning won't hold very long. So keep up with your tuning, put it in your calendar. You know, if it sounds, you can hear beats, the tone isn't pure, that means that unisons are out of tune.

The strings, you have two or three strings on every note of the piano and even single strings in the bass but for most of the piano there are three strings and if they're not right in tune with each other, you hear waves or beats, it doesn't have a pure sound. If you hear that, it's time to tune your piano.

More than that, if you're wondering if your piano has lost pitch or has gotten higher, there are apps you can get on your phone and you can check to make sure that the pitch is stable. If you start seeing that A is deviated from 440, you're down to 437 or 438, definitely time to tune your piano. Try to keep A, this A right here, the A above middle C, that should be 440 cycles per second and you can check several notes with these automatic tuners. They'll know what note you play and you'll see a needle telling whether it's sharp or flat and which note it is. So even if it sounds fine and the unisons are pure, make sure your piano is maintained pitch.

And lastly but also important is the furniture. After all, a piano is one of the most significant pieces of furniture you have in your home, you want to keep it looking nice. What do you need to do? Well, simply dusting your piano with either a cotton cloth or a microfiber cloth, that's all you should need to do most of the time. Now if you get smudges on your piano, you can dampen the cloth slightly. If it's a piano like this with a hand rub finish where you can see the lines or if there's wood grain in your piano, rub in the direction of the lines. And that's really all you want to do because if you use any product on your piano, it builds up over time and has to be professionally removed. Now what about the inside of the piano? If you keep your piano open all the time, dust will collect in there. You can try blowing it out with a vacuum cleaner, it can get pretty messy, but even then the sound board can get really gunked up with dust and your piano technician has a tool to get under there. They actually take out the action, the entire keys, hammers, and the whole action comes out as a set and then get under there with a tool and clean it for you. You don't have to do that that often, but you want to keep up on it so it doesn't get really disgustingly dirty because then it can actually inhibit the sound and it gets harder to clean if you go really a long time. So those are the main things to think about. The environment of your piano, provide a nice stable environment, keep up with your servicing of tuning, and incidentally you can do other maintenance with voicing and regulation to keep it playing on a high level. Periodically, not every single time the tuner comes, but just keep it on a high level.

And lastly, cleaning the interior, don't use product, simple steps can keep your piano looking great, sounding great, and preserve it for decades to come. I hope this is helpful for you. If you have any suggestions for videos that I haven't done, first of all you can check whether we have a search box on livingpianos .com, put in keywords there and you'll be astounded how many different videos you'll come up with just by putting in simple kind of search terms. You know, when I make these videos I search those videos and I'm surprised all the time, you know, because usually what I do is I make a whole slew of videos like I'm doing here today and then I've got a great editor in California who puts these together for me. If you ever look at the interesting B -roll, the other things that are not just looking at me, that's Chris and give a hand, a nice shout out to Chris for doing an incredible job on these videos.

But anyway, so I look and I find I just look at the videos once to approve them and that's the last time I see them so I don't always remember what I've done. So check out the search box if there's any videos you're looking for and bring new suggestions here to Robert at livingpianos.com. This is your online piano resource. Thanks again for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-care-for-your-piano/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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