WE ARE GRATEFUL TO CELEBRATE BEING IN BUSINESS DOING WHAT WE LOVE FOR 50 YEARS
— SINCE 1974 —
REGISTERED PIANO TECHNICIAN
— SINCE 1982 —
Piano Repair in VirginiaIf you own a piano that is due or even over-due for quality refinishing, repair or restoration of any kind, from Abingdon to Zacata, to Danville to Yale to Glen Allen to Machanicsville to Richmond to Springfield, your piano repair is as close as the entrance to your local interstate. Our professional piano movers are picking up, delivering & delighting piano lovers all across Virginia with pianos we repair and restore.
American piano soundboards are traditionally constructed from old growth spruce trees from American forests. Spruce wood is exceptionally conducive to the process of converting the mechanical energy created by a piano hammer hitting its string into sound energy, which is simply the vibrations of the air surrounding the string, the piano, the piano player, and the audience. The resulting vibrations caused by the hammer's abrupt contact with the string travel down the string to the piano bridge. The bridge is the contact link between the string and the soundboard. Thus, the string's vibration is transferred to the wood of the soundboard through the bridge. The agitation produced by this conversion creates the sound we hear.
Piano soundboards are usually about 3/8 inches thick and consist of a series of spruce boards either 4 or 6 inches in width that are edge-glued together, using as many spruce boards that it takes to achieve the proper soundboard width.
The type of spruce (i.e. old growth spruce) is very important in producing high quality sound. What is sought within the old growth tree is wood grain with very low density. This type of grain is a result of slow growth (low rain and near drought conditions over time). Second growth trees are usually inferior to old growth because the second growth is harvested too quickly. That is, second growth forests are usually harvested before the trees have a chance to develop beyond their initial youthful quick-growth stage. Lumber from such young trees is usually very wide grained, which if used for constructing soundboards, produces a flat or dull sounding piano.
As you can imagine, one of the primary reasons to repair and restore vintage pianos is for their superior soundboards. But over time, the glue between the spruce boards can deteriorate. This does not indicate an inferior soundboard, but only a need for professional repair. If your piano in Virginia needs soundboard work, we will look for splits along the grain and make sure the glue that binds the spruce boards is solid and strong enough to last the life of the piano.
From A to Zymbelstern, the Virginia Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary was created in 1996 by Richard Cole of the Virginia Tech Department of Music, and Ed Schwartz of the Virginia Tech New Media Center. This dictionary is extremely helpful in the study of music, especially for beginning music theory research and discovery. Of course, it's not surprising that there are no entries for "piano repair" or "piano refinishing " or "piano restoration," another indication that piano rebuilding is a technical field -- a craft -- best left to professional Piano Rebuilders.