Piano and Music Videos

Recently I received this question from a viewer:

“If baby grand and upright pianos have shorter strings than grand pianos, and the pitch of a string is determined by its length, how can the smaller pianos play the same set of low notes as grand pianos?”

This is a very good question and one that deals with the physics and scaling of pianos. Longer strings make lower sounds, so how can you replicate the same pitch on pianos with shorter and longer strings?

This is where the scaling of pianos comes into play. The scaling of a piano has several factors which affect pitch. It is the combination of the length of the string, the thickness of the string, and the tension it is under that will determine its pitch. Scaling is something that is determined when the piano is designed and built and it is as much art as science. When replacing strings on a piano you must make sure the thickness and gauge of the strings is the same as the original ones or you could end up breaking strings! Even the steel strings vary in gauge across the piano.

Although even a small piano can create the lowest pitches, they are not pure tones. You might notice that when you play smaller pianos, the lowest notes sound muddled. The fundamental pitch is quite weak and the overtones are extremely audible. The overtones are present in all pitched sounds which create the color of the sound. In very small pianos, the overtones of the lowest notes are extremely pronounced obscuring the fundamental tone.

When I was a young boy I tried an experiment by taking my tape recorder and recording the lowest note on my father’s piano. I played the tape back on my father’s tape recorded which allowed me to hear it played back 4 times faster which also raised the pitch several octaves. The results shocked me. It sounded more like a chord rather than a single note! This is due to the overtones which are so predominant in the sound of the lowest notes of a piano. The smaller the piano, the greater the overtones and the less fundamental pitch comes through on the lowest notes. Larger grand pianos have stronger fundamental pitches on the lowest notes for a richer, cleaner sound but they still contain overtones as almost all pitched sounds do.

Let’s say you have access to a baby grand and a concert grand in the same room. If you played the same low notes on both instruments you would instantly be able to tell the difference in tone between the two because of the different balance of fundamental tones and overtones between to the two.

Today’s question is something you might or might not have heard of. You’ve undoubtedly heard a prepared piano on film scores but you might not even realize what you were hearing. Today we’re going to discuss what it is as well as how you can experiment with these sounds yourself.

The piano has been around and advancements have been made over hundreds of years. Despite where the instruments are today, some composers still want to get even more out of the instrument. Composers like John Cage and others have experimented with altering the piano by adding different tools and other objects to the inside of the piano.

The video included with this article gives you an example of how a prepared piano can look and sound, although there are endless possibilities. We used just a few household objects placed on top of and between the strings. You are certainly not limited to just these types of enhancements; sometimes players will pluck strings or make changes to the keys as well – the only limit is your imagination and the capabilities of your piano.

If you feel brave enough to try and prepare your piano and experiment with different sounds, go for it!

This is a musical instrument after all and anything you want to do to illicit new sounds is fair game – there are no strict rules for what you can and can’t do. Just be careful not to harm the piano and certainly be wary of doing anything that involves pulling the action of the piano – this is something only a technician should be doing for you.

You might have heard this term and wondered exactly what it meant. Is an art-case piano something that affects the sound or function of a piano – or is it just a cosmetic difference? Today we will discuss what makes a piano an art-case instrument and how they differ from other pianos.

If you see a piano that has intricate carvings on the case, the music rack, or the legs it would probably classify as an art-case piano. There are many different models and types of art-case pianos but they are all similar in that they have more details in the case including the possibility of intricate woodwork and carvings that differ from traditional design pianos.

Here are a couple different examples of art-case piano designs:

Steinway Louis XV

French Provincial Art-Case Upright Piano

German-made Feurich with Burled Mahogany

Steinway Model A Art-Case from 1893

German-made Blüthner Art-Case

Sohmer American-made Art-Case

As you can see, there are many different types and designs of art-case pianos. So you might be wondering, does any of this effect the piano as an instrument?

Art-Cases are made by many different manufacturers in addition to their regular case designs. They are usually exactly the same pianos internally, but with more intricate elements in the cases. They have the exact same parts as their regular piano models and are not compromised as instruments in any way. So for example, the Steinway model A art-case is the same piano as the traditional spade leg Steinway model A.

So why would you want an art-case piano? It’s all based on your taste in furniture. After all, a piano is one of the most significant pieces of furniture you invest in as well as being a musical instrument. Some people prefer the more intricate woodwork and others would rather have a basic piano design. Art-cases tend to be a bit more expensive, but it’s purely an aesthetic preference.

Console and Spinet Pianos can look almost identical from the outside case but what lies beneath separates them a great deal from one another.

Both spinets and consoles are upright-style pianos that are typically very short The fundamental difference between the two types of pianos are the actions.

Spinet Pianos

Spinet pianos have what’s called an indirect blow action (or drop action). The instruments are so small that they have to change the way the action works in order to fit them into the piano.

Compared to a typical piano action, spinet pianos have shorter keys and they have rods that connect each key to the rest of the action. This is why they are called indirect blow actions, because you don’t have a full length key that interacts directly with the action. Instead it drops down to the other part of the action.

Console Pianos

Whether it is short or tall, a console pianos have a regular style upright action where the key is much longer and connects directly to the action:

Pianos Today

Nobody makes spinet pianos anymore. At some point they lost favorability with consumers and have since been replaced by less expensive consoles that don’t have to sacrifice the quality of the actions.

Despite spinets having different actions, there were some higher quality models – the Baldwin Acrosonic being a classic example – that were decent pianos. The inherent limitations in console and spinet pianos lies more in the size of the pianos more than anything else. With a smaller soundboard and shorter strings, the pianos are limited in the amount of sound they can produce.

Generally console pianos are superior to spinet pianos because of the regular style actions and the slightly taller size of the instruments which offers a more rewarding sound.

This is something many of you might not be familiar with, it’s truly a topic for Steinway aficionados or those curious enough to look underneath their pianos. So what is the Steinway bell and what does it do?

If you have ever looked below a large Steinway grand piano, you would have noticed a strange piece of metal that is attached to the bottom of the piano. It looks like this:

As you can see, it has the shape of a bell – which is where it gets its name – but does it actually serve a purpose? The short answer is yes.