How a Note Plays

• Inside of a Piano
  
  When you push a key down on a piano, you hear a note play. If you open a piano, you can see what makes the sound. A wooden hammer covered with felt is attached to the part of the key you can't see. When you press a key, it pushes the hammer into sets of one, two or three steel wire strings and lifts the damper off the strings. The vibration of the string makes the sound. When you lift your finger off the key, the hammer falls back into place, the damper rests onto the strings, and the vibrations stop. Each string vibrates at a different frequency depending on the length, weight, tension and thickness of the strings. High pitched notes come from shorter, lighter, tighter strings. Thinner, looser, longer strings produce low-pitched notes.
  
  

Volume, Pitch and Tone

• Inside an Old Piano
  
  Vibrating strings alone don't make a very loud sound. There's a wood soundboard inside the piano with strips of wood nailed across it to amplify the sound. There are also pedals on pianos that are attached to the damper that make the sound softer or sustain the note. Newer pianos have a middle pedal that can do one of three things. It can lift only the dampers on the bass notes, it can mute the notes for a very soft sound by placing cloth between the hammers and strings or it can sustain the note or notes that were played when the pedal was pressed.
  
  Most pianos you have in your home need to be tuned every 6 months. A piano tuned to concert pitch is tuned so that the string for the A note above middle C vibrates 440 times per second. Over a 6-month period, pianos very gradually go out of tune. By 6 months, you usually notice that it sounds out of tune.
  
  The quality of the tone on your piano depends on how your piano is built. The tension, length and diameter of the wire, the material the wire is made of, the number of strings that are grouped per note and the layout of the strings make a difference in the tone. The quality of the wood the soundboard is made of, where the bridge is placed and how thick it is influences how rich piano tone is. Look for pianos with solid spruce soundboards. The material the hammer is covered with, the size and weight of the hammer, how far from the bridge the string is struck by the hammer and how hard the striking surface is determine a piano's tone.
  
  

Piano Types

• Pianos we see now are different from the ones famous artists like Mozart, Bach and Beethoven played on. There are two basic types of pianos today--the grand piano and the upright piano. Grand pianos have horizontal placement of the strings and frame with the strings stretching away from the keyboard. Grand pianos are very large, allowing for longer strings that vibrate more freely and produce better sound. The grand piano has a lever on each key to catch the hammer close to the strings as long as keys are repeated and played quickly. This lets you play staccato notes and trills quickly. Upright pianos are smaller than grand pianos because the strings and frame are vertical and stretch in both directions from the keyboard and hammers. The hammer return on upright pianos depends on springs that can wear out. But a high-quality upright piano that is well taken care of and regularly repaired can produce tone quality as good as that of a grand piano while taking up much less space.