Piano Video Lesson: No Piano is Above the Law!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. Today we're going to talk about how no piano is above the law.

I'm going to give you the 10 commitments of living pianos. And this is important for any of you who are thinking about getting pianos or if you've ever gotten a piano or know anybody getting pianos, this is important information. So let's start with the fact that some pianos, of course, need new parts. In fact, some of our pianos are completely rebuilt and it takes a year or more to rebuild everything. But nevertheless, no matter what piano it is, even if it's a late model used piano, there are 10 things that absolutely must be checked. And you can check this for yourself any penny you're looking at. Number one, we have of course tuning. Now this is much more involved than you might think.

Just taking a brand new piano out of the box and tuning it is not nearly enough. First of all, there are many other things we're going to get to, but just the tuning itself.

A new piano or a newly rebuilt or restung piano is going to require many tunings to become stable. All of our pianos here at Living Pianos, we tune multiple times to get them stable. Not only that, but after the piano becomes acclimated to your home, we send a high -level piano technician to do another tuning and to make sure everything plays beautifully for you. What else is there? Oh, there's a whole lot more. There is damper regulation. You know when you release chords, you want to get a clean release like that where all the notes end at the same time and you don't get any buzzing or noises.

This needs to be regulated and there's dampers on most of the keys of the piano so it entails quite a bit of work. Now, action regulation is even more involved when you push down a key on your piano.

We're setting in motion dozens of parts and they must work in perfect harmony and synchronicity.

And there are several adjustments for each and every key of the piano that have to be meticulously adjusted in order to get optimal performance, number one, and evenness from key to key throughout the entire piano. It's an arduous task and it's as much art as science. Along with regulation is voicing. Now, voicing is the sound of each note, not the mechanics, but the sound. Every single hammer has to be shaped precisely and the contact with all three strings must be precise as well as the alignment with each of the sets of strings throughout the entire piano. The hardness of each hammer also will affect the tone. So you want to get a beautiful rich tone that's not too bright and not too warm throughout all registers and again evenness from note to note throughout the entire instrument. This is something we spend an incredible amount of time, I work closely with our technicians to achieve this.

Then of course you have pedal adjustments.

I talked about the sustained pedal. Well, the dampers have to be individually adjusted to release, but the pedal itself must be quiet, it has to have the right amount of travel, it can't make any kind of clunking noises or hang up at any point. It's got to be a smooth up and down motion. And what about the other pedals? You've got the sustenuto pedal, the middle pedal. Now, even though it's rarely used, if you need it, you need it. And in some 20th century music, it's called upon and we make sure they work as well as the unicordia pedal. This is by the way one of my favorite aspects of expressiveness on the piano. The soft pedal, when you engage it, gets a different color of sound. And yes, this needs to be not only adjusted to shift the action the right amount, you'll notice that the keys move to the left and right when you push the pedal so that the hammers strike the strings from a different part of the hammer. And yes, you must voice that part of the hammer so the hardness of that part of the hammer is different from the hardness of the other part of the hammer to get a tonal shift. Going on, you have more things. When you get a piano, if it's not totally rebuilt, pianos get all kinds of dirt and dust in them and they need to be professionally cleaned. You know, getting underneath the strings to the soundboard, there's a special tool. The strings themselves might have light corrosion that needs to be cleaned off. Between the coils of the bass strings, any gunk or dust in there is going to inhibit the free vibration of the sound. This all has to be taken care of. Likewise, it's also important to make the furniture look beautiful. Now, some of our pianos like this Mason and Hamlin are refinished so it looks like new, but a lot of times the finish just needs to be refreshed or maybe you have a beautiful finish with a couple of blemishes. They need to be touched up to make the piano look as beautiful as they sound and play.

And finally, there's the metalwork. The brass needs to be polished. In the case of silver pianos that have silver hardware, sometimes they need to be replated.

So these are the ten commitments you get from Living Pianos with all the pianos. And you can use this as a checklist for any pianos you're looking at anywhere because these are all vital parts of your piano. Of course, the structure I haven't even gotten into, soundboard, pin block, that's taken for granted when you buy from Living Pianos because we rebuild and replace any parts that aren't up to a high standard to get a beautiful performance out of pianos.

So anytime you're shopping for pianos, vote Livingpianos. Give us your vote of confidence. Thanks so much for joining us, Living Pianos, your online piano store.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/no-piano-is-above-the-law/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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