Last night I was at a show by a jazz pianist. During one song, she reaching into the grand piano, holding something that looked like a shiny silver bar, maybe 10" long and 1" wide, and placed it on the strings. She was playing with her left hand at the time, so what ever she was doing was close enough to reach while also playing the keyboard. She did that 2 more times, each time leaving the silver bar inside the piano. When she was done, the sound of the piano was transformed, for a section of the keys, to sound quite a bit like a harpsichord. At the end of the song, she reached in and removed the 3 bars, and the piano was back to it’s standard sound.
I used to do that by laying pencils across the strings. The pencil (or bar) bounces a bit when the string vibrates, dampening it, and giving it a kinda harpsichord-like sound.
It was almost certainly a mandolin attachment. When I was a kid we had an upright which had a mandolin attachment which you could raise and lower by pulling on a cable attached to a stop on the far bottom right of the console. It would lower the mandolin attachment into place and you could raise it by pushing the stop back into place. It was always fun to play around with, and much safer for the instrument than using thumbtacks.
I seem to remember hearing that this trick is used to make an ordinary piano sounds like a piano from an old western bar room movie scene. Can you confirm this.
It’s called “tack piano” when the instrument is prepared in this way. It does give the instrument a characteristic honky-tonk sound, however you also have to detune the strings slightly for the full effect. IIRC, upright tack pianos were common in saloons and the like because the tacks would create a louder and more percussive sound that would cut through the bar noise.
Old pianos in bars had distinctive sounds because they had not been well maintained and the felt on the hammers had hardened. So they strike the strings with a sharper blow and produce a “tinny” sound. Putting tacks on the hammers simulates this hard head surface, but is a bad idea in general because the tacks can become dislodged and then stick in the action or strings and because it damages the hammer felt.
Tape on strings, on the other hand, is a variation of some of the earliest piano preparations, which used paper. The harmonics of the string are changed, but not over the full length. This changes the tone, but not the pitch of the string. The link pulykamell gave earlier covers a lot of this type of preparation and has instances of modern pop/rock songs which used these techniques.
In fact, the hammers are utterly ruined beyond repair. But usually the tack trick is done on very old uprights, and the hammers are already long dead RBR from age and wear.
Not quite so bad for the strings, but plenty bad enough to be a stupid idea. But again, usually the tack trick is done on very old uprights, and the strings are also in very bad shape from age and wear.
Yeah, this sounds more likely than the explanation I heard, that it’s a simulation of the honky tonk sound rather than being purposely made that way, but I’ve never quite been able to find out for certain whether there were real “tack pianos” (either modified with actual tacks or similar metal surface) in old saloons or whether they were all just old hammers.
True, but I thought it worth mentioning to dissuade people from doing this frivolously.
(As a tangential aside, I used to live with a concert pianist who specialized in Rachmaninoff and similarly stormy repertoire. He too was hard on the strings - I’ve never seen a pianist break so many.)