Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum An una corda problem

Good. Your problem is now almost clear to you.

Part of my experience encompasses several music conservatories and care of the practice pianos of some of the legends of the concert world and the wear typical of those extremes. Conscientious consert pianists have not produced that much wear in ten years of ten hours a day.
From this experience I can also inform you, well, not you specifically but the general readership that your next problem if nothing changes, is going to be broken strings in a year or two, probably less.

My reasons for saying this are the same ones that tells you that years have been taken off the total life of your hammers in just one year of the kind if playing evidenced by the hammers and the lack of maintenance. An experienced tuner would have spotted this early on and informed you accordingly. The only Eason I resorted to dynamite was because you just weren't gettin it. A whole mess o fish came out the water, though.

With this kind of wear, that piano is being played with unnecessary vulgar force by somebody or other. Hand injuries often result from this.

Advice??? Any advice I give is purely unintentional. My object is to have the inquisitor understand their problem more fully that they might intelligently explore their options. I stay away from oughts and shoulds.

Two options that come to mind are obtaining a days' service and some remedial piano lessons for whoever is brutalising that piano.

For a piano to sing out above a symphony orch does not take brute force. In fact, quite the opposite. Projection takes place well below the action and stringing saturation point. This piano has been driven beyond that point.

Hammers are like tires. The more you drive it the sooner they have to be replaced.

And how often are hammers replaced on a concert instrument - say, at Royal Festival Hall?

I don't know what I'm missing but I don't see an unusual wear on the hammers from the pictures. I have a number of clients whose hammers will like that a year after a good filing job.

It doesn't look like a rebuilt job should. How long ago did the rebuild happen?

If I may, it seems like the simple answer given by Johnkie has been overlooked. The OP said that D6 was playing the adjacent E flat when the left pedal was engaged. We now see the the hammer for D6 is traveling strongly to the right when played. The suggestion to travel the hammer correctly , then cast, or burn, as we say here on this side of the pond, the hammer so it rises evenly and squarely past its neighbors, would seem to be the solution to the original question. Difficult to set the action movement for even results with the hammers traveling in this fashion.

My 0.02 cents

The hammers in the photo are overdue for reshaping. Earlier in this thread there was a discussion about not using fine degrees of shift because the tone got fuzzy.....there's the reason. The grooves are too deep. It is of no consequence how or why, who or when the grooves got too deep, the grooves are too deep. Right here, right now.
Nor is it of any consequence who else's piano looks similar, the grooves are too deep..... and the hammers need expertly spacing and traveling (most likely the rest of the action too) and reshaping and voicing. To move only one presenting problem hammer would most likely, without further very skilled attention, serve to make that one note fuzzy on tre corda also.

In the light of what we now know about this piano what the OP has learned and what I kinda suspected after a couple of posts, why are some still suggesting a cheapie piece-meal approach to such a potentially fine piano. This is not ivory tower stuff either but just plain straightforward piano maintenance that surely is the aim for all worthwhile pianos based on best practice and not back street patch up methods. Does it make sense to spend big money on a piano and then advise letting it go to rack and ruin just a year later?
I just got thru sayin' how important pianos get serviced evry 7-10 days in order to keep the finer points of playing accessible on the instrument. If this piano is just another "knock around" piano then it doesn't matter that pianists have to limit their playing skills in order to operate it and then advise others on an international forum to limit their own playing too and all because of a crippled piano out in Northern California somewhere's.
the little loss of felt if caught early

I like the analogy with car tires. If a kid spends all day doing wheelies and doughnuts, years can be taken off the total life of the tyres in just one days' abuse. This is not a difficult concept to grasp. the only difference is that tires need to be replaced. Gone are the days of retreads. Hammers can be refaced or reshaped with little loss of felt. If the resilience of the shoulders is also maintained or increased, the need for this reduces somewhat over the years of regular maintenance and the tone develops.

No, the tone is not fuzzy. The hammer hits the wrong strings.

Do you expertly space, travel, rescale and voice an entire action every 7 - 10 days??

If no, then how often would such a thing occur? Please.

I meant reface not rescale, (spellchecker)

This is getting silly.
I'm using the words maintenance and service in their commonly accepted meanings.

A private car is serviced every few thousand miles a race car is serviced ever few laps. That's the difference.
When you check the oil in your car do you put more in if the level is OK do you put more air in your tyres if they show sufficient pressure???

The concept is not difficult to grasp.

I refuse to enter into adolescent arguing techniques. I only reply do that there is no misunderstanding among the general readership here

OP. read your own posts concerning why you misguidedly advised us all against using the shift pedal in fine degrees and why.

If you were serious about this, you would, like most inquisitors here, be asking for the name of someone who could do the work, by now.

A word to the wise, if you treat any tech who you ask to do the work in the way we have seen on this thread, an experienced tech will very likely refuse you sometime during the first phone call.

Then it will come as no surprise that I am not like most inquisitors.
But this thread is not about me, and it's not about a particular piano, with a D6 desparate for attention.

If you don't want to converse with me, then don't write on the thread.

I do, however, have a concern, and I'd be happy to hear what you think, since my impresison is that you are amongst the most experienced. I'd also be happy to hire you, although I wouldn't want to get you in trouble for advertising yourself on this forum.

I appreciate your sense of humour from 6,000miles away. It travels well.

Hatchet burried.

No animosity. Our interchange has been educational and beneficial to many, it seems, concerning frequency of maintenance being dictated by the condition of the piano and the expectations placed on it, irrespective of the passage of time.
All the best.

Thank you. What is the mechanism involved in degrees of shift pedal? For instance a 1/2 or a 1/4 shift?

There are no mechanical stopping points but the whole mivent is a simple continuum from tre corda to due corda.

One of my pleasures is to listen to a pianist as they acquaint themselves with a piano that they don't know. As they find the different qualities available from within the instrument and begin to create tone colors.

They will find for themselves the various points along the continuum that they can use in their planned program. this discovery can continue into the actual concert as the audience makes its presence felt in both the atmosphere and the acoustic.

Some, of course, use the pedal simply as an up/down, on/off switch.

Strange as it may seem, the most music is created when a pianist continues this search into the concert. Pure magjic happens.
Curiously, it is when a pianist is not quite 100% comfortable with the piano that most enthusiastic standing ovations occur. Maybe they're still searching.

I'm having a hard time imagining how there can be a continuum from tre corde to due corde. Surely, either the left-hand string is stuck, or it's not struck. How could it be partly struck and partly vibrating in sympathy?

Hello, MRC-
Effectively, the voicing at different points along the lateral width of the hammer head are different. The points on the hammer head where groves typically develop, the default, un-shifted position, may lead to the brightest sound depending on overall condition of the hammer. Shifting away from this default position, even with all strings contacted by the hammer during a key strike, may lead to a softer sound.

Best wishes-

Manufacturers leverages and recommendations differ but approx. one inch of travel in the pedal results in aporox. one quarter inch travel in the piano action. It's not the sort of adjustment that is measured that way but is a result of aligning hammers and strings very precisely.

There is a point where the unstuck strings are all brushed evenly by the hammer, then a little more pressure on the pedal and the hammer misses the unstruck string entirely. There is usually a good eighth of an inch clearance before the hammer hits the strings of the next note so a lot of compression or over adjustment is necessary in order for the hammer to hit a string of the next note.

Before all of this, there is a small range of soft felt on the hammer still hitting all three strings.

This is five degrees from three strings to two. (full, soft felt full, glancing, clearing with soft felt and clearing with harder felt as the hammer hits the strings in the grooves left by the other two strings
A skilled pianist can find these spots with uncanny accuracy, given the tiny increments carefully set up by the technician. usually by pressing the pedal while playing until they find the spot they want.

As you might imagine. To get a piano in this condition and keep it there takes painstaking and highly skilled attention on a very regular basis. It takes levelling and mating on a moving target to a whole different level for starters.
One London concert hall spends almost 20,000 GBP on the regular maintenance of just two concert pianos. Since practice time is limited in this extremely busy concert/ recording/ broadcast hall, the pianos have to be predictable. That's one extreme. the best that can be done in most cases is to not let the grooves get too deep and keep everything spaced and adjusted optimally. Of course unnecessarily continual brutal practice habits makes any fine work impossible to maintain.

Whether the original design of the pedal encompassed or envisaged these degrees of use is of no consequence. The fact remains that this is how pianists use the shift pedal and technicians should be aware of that. It creates no more wear than using it as an on/off switch, probably less.

Here's the deal: The una chorda pedal is fairly unpredictable on pianos. You really have to use it and get a sense of what its possibilities are. As has been mentioned before, on new pianos that have not had shift voicing addressed there may be no discernible effect when using the pedal. On an old piano with deep grooves in the felt it may be so dramatic to make it useless - except for a 'practice mute' type of sound.

Like many aspects of playing piano, you can't just assume a certain approach that works on one instrument will produce equal musical results on another. There is always a feedback loop that has to be established between the player and the instrument. You must try the pedal in different degrees and see what you get. Sometimes I like just barely shifting it, other times half way or all the way. It depends on what the sound is like.

And to make things more complicated, except on very nicely voiced pianos, individual notes respond to the una chorda differently due to inconsistencies in string spacing and leveling, hammer spacing and traveling, hard and soft spots on individual hammers, etc.

This means you have to really listen, experiment, and explore with a particular piano and get to know what its una chorda can and cannot do.

Many thanks for all these replies. I'm fascinated by this idea of using the shift pedal at points other than the two extremes, since it's the first time I've come across it in my long and varied experience as a professional musician.

I cannot find much information or research on this subject. In the regulation and voicing manuals from Steinway and Kawai there are no specific recommendations for achieving a grading between the two end states, nor any suggestion that the piano will be played with the shift pedal in an intermediate position.. None of the books on piano technique that I have read have mentioned the idea. I'd be most interested if somebody could come up with some references from either the piano technicians world or piano teaching world.For decades I have accepted the teachings I received at the RCM, where I was told that playing with the shift pedal in an intermediate position would be bad for the hammers. It's very interesting to see an experienced technician stating the contrary here.

I spent some time today trying this out on my piano. It's due for voicing (the technician is coming on Thursday), so it will be interesting to hear the difference afterwards. At present I can distinguish four states:

- The normal sound: sweet, singing, in ff brilliant but not overly powerful and with a multitude of shadings in the ppp to p range (I love my Lipp!)
- With the shift pedal very slightly depressed, a thinner, slightly "tinny" sound. This varies considerably from note to note so it's not really usable.
- With the pedal depressed just the slightest bit more, a muted sound that is for me characteristic of the sound this pedal should produce. It's usable right into the ff range, where the sound is warm and rounded. Continuing to depress the pedal does not change the quality of the sound until right at the end, at which point I hear a tiny change:
- At the end of the range, the sound still has the muted quality but there is a slight, almost undetectable increase in "bite".

Since the second state isn't of practical use, I have three usable states on my own piano. The difference between the last two states is very small, but maybe when the hammers have been re-voiced I will discover more nuances. I shall certainly discuss this with the technician.