David Stanwood, piano player, piano lover, technician and innovator, recalls being “spoiled” at an early age, by an accidental encounter with a single instrument.
It was a seven-foot Bösendorfer, in a show room, and when he played it, he said: “I felt as if I’d put on magic gloves.”
It wasn’t just the tone; it was the touch.
Later, when he went to the North Bennet Street school in Boston to become a technician, he remained fixated on that aspect of the craft in particular; what they call the “action” of a piano, the way the complex arrangement of levers, wires and hammers responds to the player’s touch.
“It’s the interface between the artistic intention and the sound that comes out,” he said.
That’s a mechanically complex interface; there are some 5,000 parts between the musician and the performance. But, at its most simplified, the whole conundrum comes down to the relationship between how hard the player’s fingers go down on the keys and how hard the hammer hits the strings as a result.
For the roughly 300 years since the piano was invented, the adjustment of the actions of pianos, even the best ones, was a pretty imprecise affair.
Some pianos had light actions, which suited certain players. Some had a heavy action, and suited others. And the action tended to vary not only among instruments, but even among the different keys on individual instruments, which really suited nobody.
Until now, that is. The West Tisbury artisan, having devoted himself for decades to trying to solve the problems of piano action, thinks he now has them licked. He has invented something that will allow any musician to effectively customize any piano to suit their playing style. And do it in minutes, themselves, just by adjusting a couple of knobs.
Think of what the system could mean for concert pianists who, unlike most other musicians — violinists, for example — do not consistently play their own instruments, but encounter new ones in every hall.
Now, they can simply recalibrate every new instrument to their personal touch preference.
The concept is really just Grade One physics. If one alters the pivot point of a lever, one adjusts the mechanical advantage. If the pianist twiddles the knobs on the front of Mr. Stanwood’s keyboard, a bar moves inside and adjusts the leverage. Turn the knob one way and the action gets heavier; turn it the other way and the action gets lighter.
It is simple, but it is based on years of complex work.
Said Mr. Stanwood: “In my life’s work, I laid the foundations for understanding the stuff, then I started to build the knowledge of leverage and weight. And this adjustable leverage is like the keystone. Of my life’s work, this just brings it all together.”
The epiphanous moment occurred about eight months ago. But we need to take the story back way beyond that, to what preceded it.
We mentioned two problems: one being the difference in actions between pianos and the other the difference between the actions of individual keys.
Mr. Stanwood took the second-mentioned problem first. Traditionally, actions had been adjusted by either increasing or decreasing weight in the mechanism. Pieces were shaved down to reduce weight or weights were added. Getting it right was essentially an art, with the result, he said, that it was “only the occasional piano that has that magical quality, where the action seems to kind of disappear.”
He devised a system of precisely weighing each and every component of each of the 88 key mechanisms, and then applying a formula he devised, using six different variables. The complex equation, for the record (not that it will mean anything to the uninitiated) is: BW+FW=(WW.KR)+(SW.R).
“It explained the nature of balance in piano actions,” he said. “It’s a fundamental equation. Now you could take a piano apart and put it back in a way that is spectacular for piano players.”
He got a patent.
“And for the past 10 or 15 years I’ve been out teaching, working with other technicians. It turned into a kind of consulting business,” he said.
It works like this: a technician sends in a data form, recording all the variables, and Mr. Stanwood crunches the numbers according to his equation and sends back the specifications of what should be done.
“So I really work all over the world,” he said. “I’ve got about 70 trained agents here in the U.S., and a few starting to grow in Europe. We’ve just formed the Precision TouchDesign — which is my trade name — Academy.
(Two of the European agents will be on the Island next week, and one will play at Che’s Lounge.)
So, the problem of making the action consistent within individual instruments was solved. But that meant only that a piano had a consistently light, medium or heavy action.
The next challenge was to find a way to make that action adjustable.
And that is what the new invention does. To make it work, the technician first adjusts the piano to a medium position — the benchmark, he said, is the German Steinway — and that becomes the midpoint for adjustment.
The action then can be made lighter or heavier simply by moving a single bar, which uniformly alters the pivot point of each key.
So far, Mr. Stanwood’s piano is the only one with the device installed. But it has already created excitement among piano cogniscenti.
“I showed this at the mid-Atlantic regional piano technicians’ guild in Harrisburg in April,” he said.
“I brought this piano down and set it up in the exhibit hall, and I didn’t say anything. I just left a sheet of paper, explaining ‘turn the knobs to the left to make it lighter, right to make it heavier.’
“Well, piano tuners are notoriously picky. If you try to change something that’s traditional, well, you’re like the goldfish in the tank that has something wrong with it. They just attack you.
“For three days I showed this, and I didn’t get any negative feedback,” he said, displaying the book of comments as proof.
“The most important person to me who was there was the curator emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum keyboard collection in New York, one of the top piano historians in the world. His name is Lawrence Libin.
“So he sits and plays it in the light position. Then changes it and he plays it again.
“He had this stunned look. His mouth dropped open, His eyes went open and he said, ‘Wow.’”
Mr. Stanwood points to Mr. Libin’s comment in the book: “Piano history isn’t over. You’re writing a new chapter.”
“This is one of the top piano historians in the world.”
So the goal now is to market the gizmo (his word) internationally.
The cost?
“For under $10,000 you could install the system and do all the balancing,” he said.
Which might sound like big money to us amateurs, but not unreasonable for concert halls.
“It’s not rolled out yet; it’s experimental, but I expect rollout this fall,” he said. “I will be meeting [this] week with people who are world figures in piano technology.”
If all goes to plan, he foresees not only a bright future for himself, but also maybe a new industry for Martha’s Vineyard.
“I would like to have the essential pieces here cut by a computer-controlled router, as a cottage industry on the Island.
“I envision the function of this shop changing from rebuilding and restoring pianos to an international training center for people to install these.”
No doubt about it, he’s ambitious.
“The goal is to have it in every concert piano in the world in five years,” he said, earnestly.
Then, smiling, he added: “Check back with me then.”
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