Other Kinds of Piano Service

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Polishing the Case
Cleaning the Keys
Cleaning the Interior of the Piano
Mothproofing
Action Regulating
Voicing

Cleaning and Polishing

Polishing the case. Most piano manufacturers recommend against the use of furniture polish. The best way to clean dust and finger marks off the piano, they say, is with a soft, clean, lint-free cloth (such as cheesecloth) slightly dampened with water and wrung out. Fold the cloth into a pad and rub in the direction of the grain of the wood, using long straight strokes. Then repeat with a dry cloth pad to remove any remaining water droplets. If you insist on using furniture polish, make sure it contains no silicone. Some piano supply companies sell polish especially made for piano polishes, available from your technician.

We offer cleaning cloths and piano polishes designed to clean and protect your piano.

Cleaning the keys. Use the same kind of soft, clean cloth to clean the keys. Dampen the cloth slightly with water or with a mild white soap solution. Don't let water run down the sides of the keys. If your keytops are made of ivory, be sure to rub each key with a dry cloth right after cleaning it. Don't let the water stand on the ivory for any length of time. Since ivory absorbs water, the keytops will curl up and fall off if water is allowed to collect on them. Use a separate cloth to clean the black keys, in case any black stain comes off. Never use chemical solvents, furniture polish, or cleaning fluids on the keys.

Cory's Key-Brite Spray Polish is designed to clean piano keys. It cleans, brightens, and preserves all plastic, ivory, and wood keyboards—even on electric pianos!

Cleaning the interior of the piano. Dust inevitably collects inside a piano no matter how good a housekeeper you are. When the technician removes the outer case parts during regular servicing it's a good time to dust some of their less accessible spots. In a vertical, you can also vacuum behind the lower panel, where the pedals and trapwork are. In a grand, the area around the tuning pins and the inside perimeter of the case can be vacuumed out. The tops of the dampers in a grand can be cleaned very gently with a a clean, dry cloth (no water here, please).

The big question is how to clean the grand piano soundboard under the strings. Piano technicians clean this area with specialized tools that are inserted between the strings. Thoroughly cleaning the soundboard in this manner can take a long time. A simpler way that will suffice for most piano owners is to attach the vacuum cleaner hose to the exhaust end of the appliance (you can't do this with all vacuum cleaners, however) and to blow the dust toward the tail end and straight side of the piano, where it can then be vacuumed up. An air compressor will do the job even better. (Hanging a damp sheet from the lid at the tail of the piano will prevent the blown dust from spreading about the room.) This method won't get the soundboard spanking clean, but it will put off the day when the more thorough cleaning will be necessary. Cleaning the piano action and under the keys on both verticals and grands should be left to a piano technician. In most cases, once every few years will be often enough.

Mothproofing. Moths love the wool cloths and felts in pianos, especially the hammers, dampers, and under the keys. The wool is mothproofed in the factory, but this is only a temporary treatment, good for a few years. In most situations, a periodic, thorough cleaning of the piano action, as described above, will keep the moth problem under control. In more severe cases, the technician can provide mothproofing agents that are safe to put inside the piano.

Action parts need periodic adjustment to compensate for wear, compacting and settling of cloth and felt, and changes in wooden parts due to atmospheric conditions. Making these adjustments is called regulating. Most new and rebuilt pianos will need to be regulated to some extent within six months to a year of purchase because of initial settling of cloth parts. Thereafter, frequency of regulation will depend on the amount of use. A piano in the home played an hour a day might need a full regulation only once every five to ten years, whereas one played all day by a professional might benefit by a full regulation every year. Small amounts of regulating done as necessary at each tuning will put off the day when a full regulation is needed. A full regulation of a vertical piano action in good basic condition usually costs between $300 and $400; a grand regulation between $400 and $700. The price spread partially reflects the lack of agreement about what particular procedures regulation should include. Some adjustments, such as hammer filing, may not be included in a standard list of regulating procedures, but are often performed in conjunction with regulating nonetheless.

Although letting your piano go out of tune may not harm it, letting it go badly out of regulation may. For instance, hammers that block against the strings instead of releasing could break, or cause strings to break. Excess space or "lost motion" between two contacting parts could make one part punch the other instead of pushing, causing unnecessary wear.

Two other operations I would like to call to your attention to are screw tightening and hammer spacing. The hinges, called flanges, on which all the action parts move, are screwed to the action frame. These screws—some two to three hundred of them—loosen with time due to vibration and wood shrinkage. When they get loose, the parts get noisy and move out of alignment. Have your technician check the tightness of these flange screws once a year, preferably during the dry season when they are loosest.

When flange screws get loose, or when wooden parts warp, hammers and other parts may go out of proper alignment. Once hammers are left mis-spaced for a length of time, spacing them correctly can be more involved, requiring reshaping or replacement. A little time spent at each tuning checking and adjusting hammer spacing can lengthen the life of the hammers considerably and can also provide benefits in evenness of tone.

Voicing, or tone regulating, is the adjustment of the tone of the piano, mostly by changing the density or hardness of the hammer felt. To put it simply, hardening the felt will make the tone brighter, softening it will make the tone mellower. Sometimes other, more complex, changes in tone can be accomplished, too. Voicing techniques include proper alignment of the hammers with the strings, filing or sanding a layer of felt off to reshape the hammer and eliminate grooves, ironing the hammer flat or treating it with chemicals to harden it, and pricking it with needles to soften it. To eliminate any other variable that could affect the tone, a piano must be in perfect tune and regulation before it can be voiced.

New and rebuilt pianos may sound quite bright after six months or a year of use and may need some voicing to compensate for the packing down of the hammer felt. After that, frequency of voicing should depend on how much you use the piano and on how often you think the tonal quality is not longer optimum. A hint: I find that 90 percent of complaints about tonal quality disappear after the piano is tuned.

To regulate, voice, or have a technician inspect your piano please call us at 1-800-241-0001 or use our contact form.

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