If you’ve ever watched ‘Westerns’, you will notice that saloon scenes are common and they often feature a pianist performing live on an upright piano. What’s usual, though, is the sound that comes out of these pianos. I’m unable to describe it precisely, but they seem have a much more ‘twangy’ sound to them than conventional pianos.
What gave 19th century saloon-style pianos their characteristic sound? Was it a special foot pedal, some type of modification, or did it have something to do with the way they were manufactured??
Could I go into the piano store they have at the mall and purchase a saloon-style piano?
Pianos have two or three strings per note (two on the lowers and three on the uppers), and IIRC, one of the set is detuned to get the familiar, twangy sound.
Not to forget the old favorite, the “tack” piano – so-called because carpeting tacks or similar were inserted into each of the piano’s felt hammers. In the 1970s, James Booker recorded an entire session using one of these (rented from Studio Instrument Rentals). Funky little sound.
But I think the more common sound in movies is just a good old out-of-tune piano as described above.
If you want to recreate that sound, follow Billy Powell’s suggestion. Insert tacks on the hammers. You should be able to find a reasonably good old upright piano for two or three hundred dollars. They are cheap now because of the excellent quality of electronic pianos.
A piano tuner could probably tell you how to insert the tacks and which kind would be best. Or you could just experiment.
In the early 1960’s, I played a tack piano for a college production of an old-fashioned melodrama with oleo acts in between the acts of the play. Great fun and it didn’t have to be out of tune!
I have heard the “twangy” sound referred to as “honky-tonk” piano … as others have said, it’s simply out of tune, and not just here and there like you might find on your average, tuned-once-a-year piano, but consistently, as if it hadn’t been tuned for many years.
The honky tonk style was more of a mid-20th century thing, and was deliberately designed for that authentic fake nostalgia feel. The aim was to produce a piano sound that gives the impression of the piano having had a long, hard and interesting life, and this was done (as mentioned in previous posts) by deliberate detuning and adding tacks or metal strips to the felt hammers.
If you really want to go to town, make yourself a prepared piano, or just use a sampler and these John Cage samples.
Don’t ask too much about the provenance of this knowledge, but for two examples of “tack” pianos in a Western, see the first two saloon scenes in “For a Few Dollars More.” (They are also not well tuned).
For a regular out-of-tune piano, see the piano sound used in “Tombstone” (e.g., “This happens to be a Nocturne,” and elsewhere).
I’ve heard the tacks will seriously eff up your piano strings, but that seems too commonsensical to make much of.
Never heard of that one, lissener. Ordinarily, I’d call BS, but people have done might strange things to their pianos, so I don’t really have grounds to doubt you.
One other small point that might contribute to that “saloon” sound is that much ragtime/stride piano music employs octaves in LH and RH. Not only might an octave not be properly intonated, but a drunken/opiated pianist might be liable to hit a major 7th or minor ninth or something instead of an octave, in addition to grabbing a random collection of notes within this span with the knuckles of fingers 2, 3, and/or 4, any of which is liable to sound anywhere from slightly “off” to downright terrible.