A piano soundboard can be made from many diverse materials including Western red cedar, Sitka spruce, Alaskan yellow cedar, Eastern White spruce, European white spruce and other varieties. I have even heard pianos that were manufactured with a carbon graphite soundboard covered in spruce veneer. A little weird, but not too bad. A piano manufacturer from Germany, Ulrich Sauter, tells me that his piano company even tried thin metal on one occasion. I asked him how that sounded, and he stated that while the tone was loud and powerful, it was not very warm nor subtle.
Hmm...interesting.
Sounds like a good metaphor in the making.
I have been a piano tuner for over forty years and a maker of soundboards for about thirty-two years. I had no intention of doing anything more than tuning and some light rebuilding until a nice lady from Grand Rapids, MI asked me to look at her Steinway with the intention of my restoring it. The year was 1991 BG (Before Google), and so I looked up her address on a map. A 'map' is a large piece of thicker paper that displays a given geographic area. There are city, county, state, country and world maps in all types of colors and styles. When they are purchased new, they are folded so as to fit nicely into your vehicle's glove box. Unfolding them is necessary to view the map, but also very risky as once you have done so, you have to get them folded back up again so it can fit back into the glove box.
Nothing more on this subject needs to be said here.
I arrived at the home, knocked on the door and found the 1923 Steinway Model A directly to the left after stepping inside her home. A Steinway Model A is nothing like a Ford Model A. The Steinway Model A is a six-foot two-inch grand piano and only sports three wheels as opposed to the Ford Model A which has four. There are other differences, but because of the title of this blog, we will stay on the subject of pianos and particularly, piano soundboards.
I always begin an examination of any piano by sitting down and playing a bit because the initial impression of tone and touch reveals a lot about a piano. After sounding out a few notes and chords I quickly determined that the original soundboard had outlived its usefulness and needed to be replaced. It had lost its 'crown' and no longer produced a sustaining tone. This subject of crown in a soundboard plays a large part in this story, but I will hold off on this topic till a bit later.
I estimated the restoration job which included a new soundboard, pin block, tuning pins, strings, new action, hammers. and because the original ivories had been replaced by a celluloid plastic that was rather ugly, I recommended new keytops. I presented my bid to my customer who accepted it, and I was thrilled to win my first complete restoration job.
Only one problem. I had never built a sound board.
I also knew that it is the very heart and soul of the piano. and if not constructed and installed properly would most likely make the tone of the piano I was restoring worse than the original. My dear mother was worried that I had bit off more than I could chew and quite frankly, I wondered if I had done exactly that. However, it was too late to back out now, and so began the quest on how to craft a soundboard. My first stop was the Steinway and Sons store in Livonia, MI where I met Dan Harteau and Hugh Gulledge, who between the two of them possess a full spectrum of piano restoration knowledge. I inquired with them about soundboard construction, and they were very generous with their extensive know-how. I learned that the soundboard is supported by 'ribs' and that these ribs are forced into a bowed or crowned shaped by means of using 'go bars' which are long sticks of white oak or hickory and when placed between the 'ceiling' of a soundboard press and its corresponding concave 'floor', clamp the ribs to the soundboard. See below photos.
This was all very helpful and though I was well on my way, I did not know the actual amount of crown to place into the soundboard. I asked another rebuilder about this who cryptically responded, "sixty-foot circle". I virtually flunked geometry and thus had absolutely no comprehension of what he was saying. I thought about it for a good deal of time until I finally realized he was saying that if you took a sixty-foot circle and measured the width of a soundboard along the circle and drew a straight line from point to point you would have your crown measurement. Remember that I virtually flunked geometry and had not the foggiest notion how to perform the necessary calculation. I hope there are some young people who both hate geometry and are reading this right now. Newsflash, you will indeed need geometry someday and take it from me, it will be helpful in your everyday life.
I am rather 'guess and by golly' in how I figure things out and I understand much better when things are laid out in front of me. So, I took a thirty-foot piece of string tied loosely to a pole in the middle of a large gravel parking lot. The other end of the string was tied to a sharp metal rod which scribed a line into the gravel as I slowly walked around the pole making sure to keep the string taut until I had drawn the sixty-foot circle in the gravel. I then measured the distance of the soundboard width (about 5 feet) along the edge of the circle. I took a straight edge and placed it from the beginning and end of the five feet length and the resulting distance between the center of that line and the inside edge of the circle was approximately 9/16".
I HAD MY CROWN DISTANCE!!!!
Some of you are undoubtedly chuckling or guffawing at my Rube Goldberg method of figuring this out, but I can only say that the euphoria I felt when discovering this was exponential².
I will skip several steps of making a soundboard in the interest of time and tell you that after building the soundboard press (quite a feat in itself), procuring a soundboard panel of 3/8" thick spruce, fashioning sugar pine ribs, gluing the ribs onto the board as seen in the above picture, gluing the bridge onto the soundboard and finally installing it into the piano, we were ready to set the plate back in and begin installing the new strings.
When we finally completed this first restoration project and had delivered it back to the customer, we were palpably relieved when she was happy with our work. Oh, to be sure, we have come a long way since then and have improved so many things in our process. However, that first soundboard was alright, and we were overjoyed.
Why all this writing about a piano soundboard? Well, I was thinking about the expression, "he or she is a good sounding board for me" and found the metaphor of a piano soundboard and a good listening ear remarkable.
First, a piano soundboard is what transmits the sound of the string. The string is like a person who needs to shore their feelings.
Second, the bridge of the piano is what connects or bridges the string to the soundboard. The bridge is like a person being the connection to someone else and is willing to be that listening ear.
Third, without the string being struck by the piano hammer, no sound comes out. The action of the hammer striking the string is like a person being willing to share their feelings.
Fourth, a proper piano soundboard is crowned up towards the string and without the crown the result is a flat, weak tone. The upwards crown is like a person who 'lends' his/her ear.
At this juncture I must mention a fundamentally critical step in the soundboard installation process.
After the soundboard and bridges are glued into the rim or case, the cast iron plate or harp is set over the soundboard area and bolted in. The strings are attached in the back onto hitch pins and in the front they are wound onto the tuning pins. The critical aspect of this is the angle the string travels up to the bridge from the hitch pin and then down to the tuning pin.
This is called bearing and here are two results of too much bearing and not enough bearing.
1) Too much bearing puts too much pressure on the bridge and the soundboard resulting in a harsh, abbreviated tone.
2) Too little bearing results in a weak, long sustaining, but completely void of power tone.
Again, it makes me realize how important it is for us to be good listeners who genuinely care about the person who is sharing their heart with us. A good buddy of mine whom I've actually never met in person, but because of reading his writings so often it feels like he is a good friend, said this to me:
"Alex, be careful not to speak too quickly, but rather be quick to listen".
It made me realize that, like a piano with too much bearing, I can begin to listen to a person share, but because of a lack of patience, I quickly become overbearing, opinionated, and thus producing a harsh, short tone that does not help the person I am supposedly listening to at all, but rather discourages them.
Conversely, like the piano with too little bearing, I can listen to a person with disinterest, barely able to stay engaged and all the while wishing they would be done so I can move on with my day. The result is a weak, ineffective tone that causes the person to feel my lack of love, and thus resulting in my not helping them at all, but rather hurting them.
The piano soundboard with perfect bearing and crown produces a beautiful, warm, engaging tone that pleases all that hear it and is like the person who listens patiently, engages only when asked or needed, and allows the person who is sharing to truly tell what it is on their mind. The sharer feels genuine love and care from the listener and the resulting warm, beautiful tone is a joy and a blessing to all.
A perfect sounding board.
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