Technical Piano Terms

What is the action of a piano? When you press the keys down, they can have hundreds of varying degrees of resistance to that pressure, making them easy to depress or hard. This is called the action, which is really a shorthand way of talking about the response to the fingers of the moving parts of the piano controlled by pressing the keys. Pressing the keys down is called the downweight, and there are actual lead weights embedded in the keys to make the key heavy or light.

    Another part of the action is the upweight, which is how fast the key returns to its normal position after the finger has released it. This release speed affects the so-called "touch" of the piano just as much as when you push the key.

    Soundboards and cases are as important as strings to the sound of a piano. A soundboard is a piece of wood set beneath the strings which vibrates when the string is struck, magnifying the sound of the string. The sound produced depends on how the wood is curved, how thin it is, what wood it is made of, and so on.

    The case is the thick wood frame, the furniture part of the piano. On a Steinway, it is made by having many men bend by hand wood around a piano-shaped mold. Some 17 to 19 layers of thin wood are glued on top of each other to produce the one curved piece of wood we call the case. The older wood of the old cases has a more lustrous, rich sound. Viennese pianos tend to have thin-sounding cases.