Major surgery for my piano

I've played piano since I was about ten years old. Because my great-grandfather's brother was a violinist and actually made his own violin (which is still in the family), my parents got me started on violin when I was eight. It was a disaster! In my entire career (and I use the term with some reservations) as a violinist, I rose to the exalted position of next-to-last-chair second violin in the Wasatch Junior High School eighth-grade orchestra. So when I started piano and was given the choice to practice piano or violin, there was really no decision to be made. Besides, piano came very easily: I tore through about three years' worth of beginner books in my first six months, and quickly got to the point where I enjoyed playing the thing.

Fast-forward a few years. My mother found out that the Salt Lake School District was closing South High School and would be auctioning off the contents, including the 6'3" Baldwin grand piano from the stage in the auditorium. She called me (by this time I was out of grad school and living in Oklahoma) and asked if I would like her to bid on it for me. Well, I had no idea whether the thing was any good; given the abuse that school instruments take, it could have been a real wreck.

I called Ed Fernley, my old piano teacher's widower, who is a tuner/technician and asked him to run down and take a look at it for me, which he graciously did. He told me that if I didn't want the piano, he would bid on it for himself. That decided it. In the end, Mom got the piano for a bid of $3100 - on a piano that probably would have sold for $16,000 in the regular market! The only problem was that the lid looked like kids had been dancing on it; given its location in a high school, that's probably exactly what happened.

The piano was shipped to Oklahoma and then to a fellow I found who would refinish the case. It turned out that the piano hit Tulsa (where the refinisher was) on the same day that Jonathan was born. My wife was seriously worried as to which baby I would visit first! (Demonstrating at least a little sense, my first visit was to the hospital.)

When the refinisher stripped the ebony paint off the piano, he discovered that the paint had been applied over mahogany veneer! We decided to just refinish the veneer with a walnut stain; the red of the mahogany would give a very warm tone, which in fact it did. The only problem was around the edges, where the veneer had not been applied since the piano was to be painted. We decided to repaint the edges, some of the trim pieces, and the music desk in ebony. The result is a strikingly-beautiful one-of-a-kind instrument.

Fast-forward again: the piano and I are back in Salt Lake. I'm noticing that the piano sounds a bit dull, and that the action is sluggish and uneven. Then I read an article suggesting that the solution to this problem is to restring the piano, something you're supposed to do every fifty years or so. There is a reference book called the Pierce Piano Atlas; it gives the manufacturer and date of manufacture for every grand piano made in the US by serial number. According to Pierce, my piano was manufactured in 1954, and it's now 2008 - time to restring!

We decide to do more than restring the piano, since the metal plate and trusses that support the string tension are getting pretty ugly, and the sounding board is almost impossibly dirty. After talking with a technician from the local Steinway dealer, he says that he knows someone who will refinish all the metal, plus the sounding board while the strings are on order. Terrific!

Thus, the day before we leave for our trip to Scotland last summer, my piano disappears into the depths of a Steinway truck to be disassembled, refinished, and put back together, destined to reappear in pristine condition when we get home. At least that's the theory. There's an old aphorism that says: "In theory, theory and practice are identical; in practice, they aren't." So true. In the event, though the piano was supposed to be done the end of June, it took until mid-October before everything was done. Let me explain why.

For a guitarist or violinist, changing strings is pretty easy: you remove the old strings by turning the tuning pins with your hand, then put the new ones on, tighten them up to tune, and you're done. For a piano, it's a bit different. To begin with, there is usually more than one string per note; the exact number depends on the brand, quality, and size of the piano. On mine, the lowest eight notes have only one string, the next fifteen have two, and the other 53 have three strings per note. That's a total of 197 strings! And they are not awfully flexible: these things are (naturally) piano wire, made of an alloy designed for toughness. Moreover, the lowest 23 strings (the singles and doubles) have to be custom made for a given type of instrument. Typically the technician will remove the old strings and send them off to the string factory for duplication - you just can't run down to the piano store and get them.

While the strings were on order, the metal frame and sounding board were supposed to be getting refinished. In reality, they were waiting in the shop for their turn with the refinisher. We didn't get the piano put back together and back in our living room until the first part of September! However, it was worth the wait, because here are the results:

The refinished plate and sounding board are absolutely beautiful. The new strings also included new chrome plated pins, replacing old ugly black carbon steel pins.

A word about tuning pins on pianos: you don't turn them by hand. In fact, it takes a special tool called a tuning hammer (though you don't hammer with it), and new pins are always about 0.001" larger in diameter than the old ones, so that they will hold securely in their resting place, the pin block.

Besides the new strings, a restringing job also requires changing the damper felts, the felts that keep each string from sounding unless you have either the key or the sustain pedal down. It turns out that the old felts have grooves where the strings have been, and there is no way to guarantee that the new strings will be in exactly the same place as the old ones!

Finally, there is one more long and arduous task that we had done when the piano was re-strung; it is called regulation. Regulation has absolutely nothing to do with the strings, and can be done whenever needed. Regulating a piano's action it is the job of making sure that each key operates exactly the same as all the others. Each key must throw the hammer at the string at precisely the same point in its travel, with precisely the same force on the part of the pianist, with precisely the same amount of hammer rebound before it is caught and held, with precisely the same ability to quickly repeat the strike if necessary, and on and on.

Piano actions are amazing pieces of mechanical ingenuity and precision manufacture. A grand piano action has about 32 parts for each key, plus about eight more parts for each damper. Altogether, a piano action contains over 3500 parts! These parts determine such things as how fast notes can be repeated, how much finger pressure is necessary to make the hammer strike the string, how far down each key can travel, and a number of other things that define the piano's playing characteristics. Here's a diagram for a typical grand piano action:

Notice that the key itself does not ever touch the hammer. Instead, when the pianist pushes on the end of the key (out of the diagram to the right) the key raises the wippen (part #30) which pushes up the jack (part #1), which raises the hammer shank and tosses the hammer (part #25) into the strings. The hammer bounces back and the hammer's tail is caught and held by the back check (part #26); if it were not thus captured, the hammer would just keep bouncing against the string - and you can imagine how that would sound (sort of like a mandolin, actually.) The other parts make sure that all those things happen perfectly, every time, and that all 88 keys perform exactly alike. And all this has to hold up to the brutal treatment given to the action by pianists!

You're probably getting tired of reading this, so let me get right to the conclusion: after new strings and refinishing the metal parts and the soundboard, the piano looks new and beautiful. That's great, but it doesn't address what pianos are really for - to be played. After new strings and a very extensive regulation of the action, my piano plays and sounds like a new instrument - it's amazing! It's cleaner, purer, brighter, more flexible, more responsive, (I'm running out of praises here), than any piano I've played in a long, long time. And it's sitting in my living room just waiting for me to come caress its fake-ivory keys!

Actually, it's better than new, because most new pianos are not regulated to the degree that mine has been. Am I happy - you bet! Well, the happiness is somewhat tempered by the fact that I can hear not only the beauty of the music but also my mistakes more clearly than before. Still, it's like going out in the garage to take the cover off an old car that's been sitting out there for years. You always thought it was an old Chevy, but with the cover off you discover a classic Ferrari. That's how I feel. Now I need to go practice...