The second most important thing you can do for your piano

A piano, grand or vertical, can be perfectly in tune and still produce a bright, brassy, tinny sound. Additional tuning will not remedy this. The cause is in the hammerheads: over years of striking the strings, the felt fibers pack and compact until the hammers are too hard, and the tone turns harsh.

Voicing works directly with the 88 hammerhead felts, softening or hardening the felt to achieve the correct tonal quality for that particular instrument. This is not an unusual procedure: all major piano manufacturers suggest voicing every five years. If it has been longer than that for your instrument, it is overdue.

The goal is to bring the hammerhead felt back to the softer density it had when the instrument was new. Less dense felt translates into a more mellow and uniform tone. The tone is still there in your piano. It just has to be brought out by a technician trained in more than tuning. Voicing can be performed on your current hammerheads, or after installation of new ones.

When Bradshaw Piano Service prepares a piano for a concert, tuning and voicing are standard procedure. Voicing is simply part of bringing out the best tonal quality an instrument has to offer. At the Baldwin grand piano factory in Conway, voicing and voicing inspection of every new grand was a Bradshaw specialty, and that same factory standard is applied today for university artists, piano teachers, and their students.

If you have ever wondered whether you could do more for your piano than just tuning, you owe it to yourself to have a conversation about voicing, certainly the biggest “bang for your dollar” next to tuning.