Piano Video Lesson: How Your Room Can Affect Your Piano: A Tale of Two Pianos

Thanks for joining me. I'm Robert Estrin and you're at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Today is a tale of two pianos. How the room can affect your piano. This is an incredible story that I would love to share with you.

My sister is also a pianist and a couple of years ago we were playing a two piano concert together. Now at that time my sister lived in the Cleveland area where she still lives.

But we were in California, in Southern California. So we didn't get to rehearse together until she came to California. So in the showroom I had two spectacularly great Baldwin seven but pianos, both model SF10s. Now while they're both great pianos there was one that was clearly the better instrument. One of them was a high gloss black, the other one was a satin black and that high gloss black was just a magical instrument.

And the other one was very good but that high gloss black was my go to instrument. I loved that piano, I loved playing it, I practiced on it and I played the other one some too. But since she was coming and we wanted to rehearse in advance of the concert that was going to be at the nearby Bowers Museum I decided to go ahead and put the two pianos in our recording studio which is right next door so I had the two pianos moved over there. Now here's where it gets really interesting.

The pianos were moved over there and I go into the recording studio and I sat down with the two pianos and I could not believe it but they switched.

The great piano was now the satin SF10 and the high gloss one was good but didn't have that character and warmth of the other one.

The same two pianos in two different rooms and one was clearly the better piano in one room and as soon as they went to the other room because of the different acoustics it was exactly opposite. Both still fine pianos, beautifully regulated, nicely voiced in tune but one was so much nicer and warmer but it was the opposite one from what it was before. So how does this impact you? Well it just shows you many many different things. First of all, where you place your piano in your home can make a tremendous difference in how it sounds and even how it feels.

Did you know that a piano that has a brighter sound can feel like it has an easier action? We've had this situation sometimes where a piano we get weighed off and the action weight is heavy and yet it doesn't feel heavy because it has a bright sound and the opposite can be true also. A piano that has normal action weight but if it's voiced kind of on the warm side and you have to work more to get the tone out it feels heavy. Well room acoustics can play the same tricks on you, these psycho acoustic effects.

So you can try treating your room and that can actually make a big difference whether you put a rug under your piano or you have curtains or sometimes the inverse. You need to put something, a flat piece of wood or even plexiglass under your piano to get the sound from underneath the piano to reflect out because half the sound of a piano comes out the bottom.

Also think about the challenge of trying to buy a piano going from showroom to showroom or even within one store going from room to room. How do you know what these pianos really sound like? Because of what I just described how these two pianos swapped which one was the great one and which one was the good one. There is no easy answer to this question but it's something to be well aware of and think about what room to put your piano in and how to treat the room and where to place the piano in the room. I'll give you one more example before we go and this is an interesting point.

There was a recording studio that I was once in and there was a piano in the room and we tried moving the piano. It had a vaulted ceiling and my natural inclination was put the piano where the ceiling was low so it could project into the room and you know what? It's exactly the opposite. Putting the piano in the high ceiling part of the room projecting into the lower part in that case sounded much better. So there's so much to consider. Acoustics are a science and an art all to itself and has a tremendous effect upon the sound of your piano.

Please share in the comments here at LivingPianos .com and YouTube any experiences you have with pianos and acoustics or if you've ever had a piano in your home and you've moved and gone to another room with your piano what it sounded like in different environments. Let's hear about it here. Once again I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Thanks so much for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-your-room-can-affect-your-piano-a-tale-of-two-pianos/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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