Piano Video Lesson: What Is the Heaviest Part of a Piano?

This is LivingPianos.com and I'm Robert Estrin asking, what is the heaviest part of a piano? You see all the parts of a piano and you wonder, what is the heaviest part? Is it the case? There's a lot of wood there. Is it the action? There's a whole mechanism of the thousands of parts that go into motion for each key and that can weigh quite a bit, but the heaviest part of a piano is the cast iron plate, the frame. In fact, in some pianos, it can weigh as much as the entire rest of the piano combined. I'll never forget many years ago, this is a long time ago, after I graduated from music conservatory and you know, I got into selling pianos for my teaching because so many people calling me for lessons didn't have pianos and it kept growing and growing and started rebuilding pianos and all of that. And I remember one time we were carrying a piano, a baby grand piano without the plate in it and we were able to just, there were two or three of us and it was no big deal. I couldn't believe it. But if you ever tried to move the plate of a piano, it is incredibly heavy. And why is it that the plate of a piano is so heavy? Well, let's do just a little bit of piano history here. If you go way back to the origins of the piano and Christopher and the early pianos, they did not have cast iron plates.

And little by little, more and more metal was added to pianos. And during Beethoven's life, you look at the pianos from Beethoven's early period to his later period, and there was more and more metal to increase the string tension. And by having thicker strings under greater tension, you could have a more robust sound. But at a certain point, there was just no way to add more metal. So an entire plate of cast iron was forged to be able to withstand the up to 40 ,000 pounds of string tension, sometimes exceeding that. That's how much pressure is exerted on the plate of a piano. So it indeed is the heaviest part of a piano. I wonder how many of you guessed that? Leave it in the comments here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano store again, Robert Estrin. Thank you so much for joining me.

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