How to Get a Great Bass Sound Out of Your Old Piano
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ม.ค. 2021
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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how you can get great bass sound out of an old piano. There's nothing more frustrating than having a piano where the lowest notes just sound pathetic. It can make you not even want to play down there! I remember practicing for many years before I had a formidable instrument, and I found that I would kind of punctuate the low notes. I would bang them trying to get any sound out of them at all. Then I would play a concert grand or even a semi-concert grand and realize I was overplaying everything below the two octaves below middle C. It would all sound too loud and ugly.
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50 years on the piano and I had never herad of twisting. Great, practical video.
Twist in the direction that tightens the winding!
I can’t stop learning from these videos! Thank you.
Good advice Robert! I might add that having the bass section hammers reshaped and voiced; then the action being regulated can help... especially after the strings are rejuvenated or replaced! Also - the labor cost of cleaning, twisting, and fooling around with those strings may make the actual replacement job expense easier to swallow. :-)
Good advise - thank you!
Thank you, Maestro. 🌹🌹🌹
This may sometimes work, but on many old pianos with poor bass, the reason is loss of downbearing (the angle the string makes over the bridge), because of drying out of the wood of the soundboard and bridge. In such cases even replacing the strings makes no difference, rebuilding is needed.
I have not one, but TWO excellent technicians-one of whom twisted one bass string the last tuning just to check if it would improve the tubby base on my new to me short pramberger y.c. It helped a bit and next tuning we’ll do more.❤️🎹
As a lifelong bass guitar player, I can vouch that your advice is true and factual. A twisted bass guitar string is visible, and can often sound "off".
If there is/are bussing notes in the bass, twisting the strings is also a good first step. It can be easy to think you have a loose bridge or a crack in the soundboard, but as soon as the strings are twisted everything clears up nicely.
Positioning the piano can affect your perception of the bass. Pull the piano well away from the wall (if it's an upright), or try moving it to different locations around the room to see which spots naturally accentuate the bass.
These are excellent points!
I fixed a dead-sounding bass string by loosening it to where I could slip it off of the bridge and then scrub the whole thing with a 3M pad. The strings around it sounded fine, so it was clear that the problem wasn't the soundboard. Also, it had more crud on it than the others, which I found strange. Was such a relief when it sounded better. (But yes you do need to be prepared for old strings to snap.)
Robert, set your refresh rate on your camera to 60hz (or whatever the refresh rate is on your TV) to stop that flickering behind you.
What are you playing Mr. Robert? Thx Tad
Word of warning! Wear leather gloves and when twisting the strings be very wary of German loops lol. I wasnt wearing gloves and have single german loops on my bass strings, as I slipped it off the tool I used to twist it and on the hitch pin, the string unwound with vigor and the German loop tore my poor old thumb to shreds!
Twisting bass strings is so much easier than replacing them, and it will many times make a huge difference. I’d say that I’ve had success about 80% of the time with twisting.
I modified my piano in electronic - AI way with an amplifier and a loudspeaker, then got a great bass from the D1 key (36.5Hz) to the F2 key (87.2Hz) . I wanted to make a demo video but my microphone can take only 50Hz and upper, so I have not done the demo yet.
My vintage 6'4 Chickering grand was totally restored inside and the bass is very strong. The last octave in the upper register could be better. That's what frustrates me.
my 1980s chickering upright has that same problem.