Pianos are really cool.
They are also pretty complex in their construction. There are about a bazillion things that affect how well one sounds and feels. I could talk endlessly about how a piano works, but I don’t want you to fall asleep while you read this. This post is to just give you the most basic explanation of how a piano makes sound.
The thing with pianos is that many piano owners don’t know how they work because all the good stuff is inside. I’ve had countless new tuning clients watch me open up their piano and tell me they have never seen the inside of their own piano before. Now, that is problematic in and of itself because that tells me the piano isn’t tuned regularly, but we will talk more about that later. Right now, I just want to chat about how this majestic instrument makes pretty music.
I’m going to give you the quick and dirty explanation. I’m not going to use my technical jargon or anything like that. I just want to share the basics of how a piano works. First, a piano is both a string and percussion instrument simultaneously. It is a string instrument because, well it has LOTS of strings. It is also a percussion instrument because you need to strike a key to get sound.
So, how do you go from striking a key to making a sound, specifically a pitch? A piano key is actually quite long. Half of it is inside the piano and you don’t see it. When you push a key down to play it, the back of the key (that you don’t see) pops up. When the key pops up, it triggers a whole bunch of parts that are attached to a piano hammer. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of the “whole bunch of other parts” in this post. Essentially, the back of the key pops up, which makes the hammer go forward (or up in a grand) toward the strings. The hammer strikes the strings for that note, which causes the strings to vibrate. While vibrating, the hammer goes back to its regular position.
Ok, got it? The key triggers the hammer to move, which hits the strings, then the strings vibrate from being struck. Voila! Let’s go a little further now into how different keys play different pitches. As mentioned above, a piano is a string instrument. Basically, the longer and thicker the string, the lower the pitch. The lowest notes (left side of the piano) are the longest and thickest, using copper wire wound around already thick regular wire. Then, the middle, or mid-range, have plain wire that start to get thinner and shorter as you go up in pitch (to the right). By the time you get to the highest pitches, the strings are very thin and very short. So, long and thick equals low and short and thin equals high.
This leaves us with a question about volume. If there are thick and long strings and short and thin strings, how does the piano maintain even volume from top to bottom? The answer to that is that the lowest and thickest strings have only one string per key, then as you go up they go to two per key, and the treble moves in to having three strings per key. This creates the correct pitches, while maintaining an even natural volume from top to bottom. This is why piano tuning is so important! Three strings per key means that those three strings need to be tuned perfectly to each other, otherwise it sounds like an old west honkey tonk piano. Nope!
I sure hope this helps give you the basics. I’ll dive into more depth in future posts, but this gives you the “in a nutshell” version. Thanks for reading!
Musically
Marta
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