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book reviews
new piano booksreviewed by T. Nelson |
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book reviews
new piano booksreviewed by T. Nelson |
Reviewed by T. Nelson
This book is for a piano technician or piano owner who needs to tune, regulate, maintain, repair, or rebuild a piano. Its unique features are that it takes a modern scientific approach, and it is exhaustive.
The most basic task on a piano is tuning it. You might think there are twelve notes in an octave, so you could just tune it to a computer that generates frequencies in equal factors of 1.059463. For example, if your A was 440 Hz, a fifth (E) would be 440 × 1⅓ or 586.6 Hz. An F would be at 440 × √2 or 622.25 Hz. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work. The reason is inharmonicity. Higher notes have stiffer strings, so their harmonics or “partials” are at different frequencies than you’d expect. Those partials are what the listener hears. They need to match, so you have to “stretch” the tuning. Igrec goes into exact detail about what to do.
If you have a tin ear, there’s software that will calculate inharmonicity for you. It will generate a frequency spectrum and a phase diagram to help you tune it. It’s not cheap and it won’t turn the torque wrench for you. Or you could use a signal generator and calculate the frequencies yourself. (Of course if you have a tin ear, tuning is the least of your piano problems.)
There are many things to watch out for. If you turn the tuning pin wrong, you might bend it. The pins need around 120 in-lb of torque to move. The strings add another 30, and they’re already close to the breaking point. Breaking a string happens a lot and it’s a big inconvenience. There are up to 20 different sizes of wire in a piano, from 0.725 to 1.275 millimeters in diameter. You need a micrometer to know which size to install and a torque wrench to help you avoid applying too much torque. Counterintuitively, a string can also break when you tune it to a lower pitch.
Bass strings are even worse. You have to twist them a certain way when installing them. They’re 40 bucks apiece. Keeping a piano running isn’t cheap.
Other authors say regulating a piano will automatically solve many other piano problems. Whether that’s true or not, there’s general agreement that a piano must be regulated before the other problems can be fixed.
Regulating consists mainly of getting the distances between parts exactly right. There are at least 15 distances to adjust, each controlled by one or more screws. Many of them work against each other, so changing one thing can screw up something else. For instance, Igrec says the let-off distance should be 1.5 mm. Drop distance should be 3 mm. Aftertouch should be 0.8 to 1.5 mm. Get these parameters wrong, he says, and keys will jam, hammers will strike twice or not at all, or it will sound or feel wrong.
Igrec is a strong advocate of using piano lubricants like Protek CLP. Unlike other authors, he also provides actual measurements. For instance, in deciding whether a hammer flange pin is too tight, instead of holding your hammer by the flange and counting the number of swings as most people do, he recommends the more scientific approach of actually measuring the torque before fixing it. And he tells us what the correct torque should be.
There are detailed step-by-step procedures for voicing, repairing, rebuilding, and moving a piano without harming it. For example, you should never let your Asian-made piano get below +40°F. Igrec says this will damage the finish. You need a workshop, good woodworking skills, and many tools. It sounds exhausting. Piano technicians can dismantle a piano, replace the pinblock, and rebuild the soundboard. The amount of skill involved in this profession is amazing.
Touch is probably the most important thing to the pianist, as it involves the piano-user interface. To get the touch working properly, you must measure downweight and upweight, calculate the friction, and maybe add or remove key leads. Touch force, Igrec says, grows as the square of the leverage between key and hammer, so positioning and length are critical. There are clever new inventions out there, like spring-assisted wippens and magnetic friction reduction systems, where the hammers are levitated by magnets to eliminate knuckle friction. Igrec says most pianists don’t realize that the dampers make the keys up to 50% heavier when the sustain pedal is up. (I suspect they probably notice on their first day, but adapt their playing to accommodate it and assume it’s normal.)
A piano can make a variety of noises besides twanging: it may creak, oink, echo, squeal, click, buzz, rattle, sizzle, zing, whoosh, or clank. It can do any combination of them at once. Each noise is a clue. The biggest clue, of course, is no noise at all.
Whether you’re repairing or restoring a grand piano or an upright, you need this book. Has 538 8½ × 11 inch pages and 761 medium-quality grayscale figures.
Other books on the subject will get you oriented, but in my opinion none has enough detail to get you a perfectly operating piano. However, they do mention the soldering iron trick for loosening a flange pin, which Igrec misses. It really does work.
Piano Servicing, Tuning, and Rebuilding by Arthur A. Reblitz. The classic repair book that every piano technician uses.
Regulating Grand Piano Touch and Tone by Danny L. Boone. Covers regulating only. Has higher quality pictures.
aug 09 2026