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Hi, anyone tried this using foam/insulation?
Any success?
Thanks in advance!
(it's an upright overstrung btw)

Do you mean spray foam?!?

I've used pillows tucked between the beams both on uprights and grands, and it reduces the sound substantially. You may not like the tone though as much, but it's a cheap trade off.

Go to www.edwardsstringcovers.com

They have a great foam insulating product that works quite well.

Thanks guys!
Any chance you could post a photo of the positioning of pillows etc?
Thanks again!

Pillows are pretty drastic in muffling the tone. The positioning would depend on how many backposts you have and how far apart they are.

It might be good to start with something more moderate. If you have an area rug (synethtic, not wool) that you can spare, hang it on the wall behind your piano. If it's long enough to go down the wall and under the piano as well, that's even better. If that doesn't quiet enough, you can attach the rug directly to the back of the piano using velcro.

Acoostic foam is available pretty cheaply at places like eBay in precut sheets and by roll. You could get a roll and cut panels to fill the spaces between the posts, but it's a lot of effort and some expense if it turns out that you don't get the result you want.

Before you do anything though, you should assess the surfaces of the room to see if they can absorb enough sound to serve a piano. Hardwood floors don't help. Smooth ston and ceramic flooring is worse. Big expanses of bare glass are awful.

Quilts or comforters are worth a try.

Cheaper yet, get ear plugs for everyone in the house.

Or +1 to Steve. I've heard the custom fit product from Edwards String Covers works.

You've heard the products working or you've heard from others in your trade that they work?

All that Edwards offers for a vertical piano are thick baffles of acoustic foam that have an egg crate pattern to the inside and a smooth surface to the outside, in other words standard acoustic foam. They cut the baffles to order. It's custom work so not cheap. If the OP wants to hold down the cost, he can buy 3" egg crate acoustic foam from any number of sources and cut panels himself to fit the back of his piano.

The thing is though that most people like the sound of a piano when they acquire it. It's their space and the piano's placement in that space that's the culprit in most cases. Muffling the natural sound of a piano is not attacking the problem at its source. It stifles the piano's sound at its source and compresses its entire dynamic range.

Treating the room surfaces will allow the piano to perform as it was intended to perform (assuming that the piano is in good working condition).

turandot's 100 percent correct.

Why is the full symphony not too loud at 103 db but your upright is at 90db? Why can I sit 10 feet away from a full concert grand in a recital and not have my ears bothered? Why is the distortion from a solid state circuit considered noise and distortion from a tube amp considered musical? I know at least a few here know the answer. The ratio of even and odd order harmonics is the answer. Could you enjoy a full tablespoon of chile powder right out of the spoon? No, sir. Not I either. But spread it out over a pot of beans, onion, tomatoes and ground beef? Yeah Howdy! Pass me a beer! Your rooms are doing the same thing. They're throwing the ratio of good sounds to bad sounds out of whack. The rooms is adding that second tablespoon of chile powder that makes you go, "yuck! I hate chile! The predominance of harsh tones caused by nearby, flat surfaces bothers your ear causing a reaction that feels like too loud. So you come here and say, "My piano's too loud" what do I do?

On the other Hand:

My wife can't hear her show. My kids can't sleep. My neighbor can't enjoy her canasta game. These are volume problems and will not be cured or helped by putting lids down, taping eggcrate to the wall, or stacking all the rugs in Turkey under the piano. Just because you made a noticeable change to the sonic signature of the room doesn't mean you did one ding-dong thing to keep the sound out of other spaces.

Real Problem number one: My piano sounds like caca.
Real Problem number two: My piano intrudes on others.

Until you know the which is the real problem at hand, all advice proffered here is specious and near useless.

Don't wreck a good piano trying to fix a crappy room. It'll still be a crappy room and you'll be trading one flavor of crappy for another. On the other hand, real soundproofing is really expensive. I added about $10,000 to the cost of a re-model making a room in which I could play the piano while my kids sleep 20 feet away. Most of the other solutions for the piano itself, practice rails, string covers and foam against the soundboard are all more than a little detrimental to the sound of the piano. The latest, greatest, newest generation of the more than sufficient Privia is about $600. If I didn't have my double walled, double doored, double windowed, testosterone-sanctuary, I'd probably take the Privia before I played a piano through a felt curtain or one that had no sustain and no tone.

Kurt

Thankyou all for your input!
I'll make a few things clearer:
I'm well aware that foam etc all over the piano will ruin the sound - it's not a long term solution - I intend to build a sound booth in the near future - this is just a temporary measure, so I can play a bit more without worrying about the neighbours!
Thanks again

Turandot and Kurt make excellent points... the ideal solution is to put the right piano in the right room.

If you don't have a recital hall, you can add rugs, curtains, panels, etc. etc., and turn your living room into something that looks like a recording studio.

You could change your piano. Most of the time that's even less practical than treating the room.

Or you could just spend under $100 on some eBay acoustic foam like Turandot suggested and put them behind the upright. Your living room wouldn't look any different. You wouldn't have to vacuum that rug or dust those curtains. You would get a tonal change, but I believe the trade off is more than fair. Use just the right amount of foam; by the time you kill the sustain it's already too quiet. If it sounds fine to you but a visitor complains that it's too quiet, well, maybe their hearing is gone.

But it's not correct to think that adjusting the room's acoutics or piano's placement will always work.

Look, no one has intimated that any one thing will be a satisfactory solution to the OP's ears, but you have to start somewhere. Assessing the properties of the room's surfaces is where I'd start. I don't like stuffing things into piano cavities. That's my taste based on experience.

If you have other sugesstions than the ones given, make them. If you're just here to be argumentative, go play solitaire.

Will always work to do what? Bake cookies? Speaking in unreferenced gibberish does nothing to help to OP. When did I ever claim that something always works for anything?

Kurt

You're repeating the nonsense that I'm trying to fight. But by all means encourage the OP to waste "under a hundred" on useless measures for his actual problem. If the foam is just resting back there and not wrecking the decor or the sound then it's also not doing any good. If a piece of foam is actually going to reduce the db spl sufficiently to keep the neighbors off his back, it's going to have to be in there between the posts enough to actually impede the soundboard. If it isn't touching the soundboard, foam by itself isn't dense enough to attenuate any but the highest frequencies which are not what's causing the OP his problems with the neighbors.

I didn't recommend the OP live in a recording studio nor a recital hall. I made the point that what MANY people call too loud is actually rotten acoustics; that people routinely listen to pianos louder than uprights without feeling that they were too loud. I'll be clear. I didn't recommend ANYTHING to anyone EXCEPT that they understand their problem before spending money on any product whatsoever. I tried to add enough background and detail to support my position. A detail you've omitted. If you can't explain the how and why, you're just another repeater of conventional wisdom offering the OP a band-aid when his problem is a bacterial infection.

Have a good thanksgiving

Kurt

I remember not all that long ago having a pissing contest with someone here who stated that loud pianos are not an issue. I rarely see posts where the issue is a too quiet piano. Why is that?

When I owned my Yamaha C3 I crawled under the piano and stuffed\wedged many towels in the soundboard. I also placed strips of felt between the lid and the body (thus outlining the shape of the piano). I placed the music rack on top of a closed lid to further quiet down the piano.

Fortunately at that time we lived in a free standing house.

Decades ago when I owned a Yamaha U1D upright I tacked carpet tiles on the soundboard (on the outer backside) and tacked carpet tiles and empty eggshell containers on the inside lid ... everywhere.

I also made my own felt drop down mute which was positioned between the hammers and the strings.

Pianos are loud, I have tinnitus, and my solution is listed in my signature. I now practice with headphones at a very quite level. When I play jobs on an acoustic piano, I wear earplugs.

One more thing, a friend of mine who is a piano technician used a solution of fabric softener and isopropyl alcohol which he applied to the hammers of my C3 (probably after needling them). That quieted down the piano but the effect only lasted for about six months.

Pianos are loud.

Pianos are silent...

and until someone,
plays upon them,
from soft touch to loud thundering
they remain silent.

.... people tend to be loud

... people tend to be loud

and yet some profiles are silent.

yet another thread which begs for an older-style lower tension piano for the home..

Chopin Played on a grand piano which even though 2.05-2.10 m in length had a moderate volume, good for the home.

Most modern grands are built with the purpose of filling concert halls!

These would seem to be measures taken out of frustration.


Even though the OP has not mentioned what piano he is working with, I think it's safe to assume that he is not frustrated with his piano and likes its tone. One does not build a sound booth to enshrine a piano one really doesn't like (at least I hope not).

Since he only wants a temporary solution, I hope that the OP would not resort to damaging the profile of his hammers with fabric softener and alcohol or compromising his soundboard by putting tacks in it.

Edwards claims that by sandwiching a grand piano with their 3" foam -- top cover over the strings and bottom panels to cover the soundboard cavities -- you can achieve a 50% reduction in sound. They make no specific claims for treating vertical pianos with foam panels between the backposts.

What Edwards does not mention is that 50% success in suppressing the loud end of the dynamic range will be matched by playing difficulties at the soft end, where a player's normal pianissimo touch will be unlikely to produce a sufficiently audible sound with any consistency.

Grands and verticals are different in the dispersal of their sound and in the player's perception of how loud that sound is. A player who finds loud playing satisfying (and somehow emotionally fulfilling) can be fooled on a long grand piano. His seat at the piano will not give him a true perception of just how loud the thing sounds to other people sharing a tight space. A player seated at a typical tall vertical has a better sense of his loudness But despite that difference, players who like to play loud seldom realize how overbearing the volume of their playing is on those who are forced to hear it. What they will notice is the unpleasantness of piano sound careening around the room boucing off hard surfaces. Changing that pattern by giving the room more sound absorbing properties will help both the loud player and those who are forced to endure his playing on a regular basis.

Recently I watched an interview with Julius-Jeongwon Kim made while he was in London recording Warrenberg's piano concerto transcription of Rachmaninoff's 2nd Symphony with the LSO. Kim commented on how wonderful the acoustics were at the Abbey Road studio where the production was made. That studio is in no way designed to simulate a concert hall. It's just a box. Yet a full orchestra and a concert grand can exist harmoniously in that space without the musicians' hearing of others interfering with their ability to execute their own part in some really loud and powerful material. It can be done, but not by suppressing musical instruments at the source of their sound or building a box within a box.