prefacing that I started strumming the piano 1 year ago and had my first experience on a digital piano, I purchased an acoustic piano a few days ago and having had the chance to try it out and analyze it in the tranquility of my home, I noticed a peculiarity that I have never noticed on the pianos I have tried in various shops:
when I play with the sustain pedal depressed, so with the dampers raised, I feel that the keyboard is very light and the keybed depression occurs with a very light touch; releasing the pedal instead, the keyboard becomes very heavy and the depression seems to be disturbed by friction towards the end of the stroke.
Is all this normal for acoustic pianos or was I delivered a piano with poorly adjusted mechanics? Or even worse, is the piano, although new, of very poor quality?
Hello and welcome to our forum. Although my first experience was on an acoustic piano and only recently I purchased a digital one, I never noticed this thing, precisely because perhaps I trained my hand directly on the acoustic piano. Logically, if the dampers are raised, the key when played should not also lift the damper mechanism, and therefore the weight becomes lighter. As I repeat to you though, perhaps out of habit, I have never noticed this excessive weight... Is the piano upright or a grand? In any case, we await the intervention of Paolo alias Pianoexpert who, as a technician and pianist, will be able to clarify this doubt for us. Greetings...
the piano is an upright and it is new, anyway I opened it and checked the movement of the action more closely after watching the very interesting lesson by pianoexpert on your website and I noticed one thing: the friction I notice does not always occur and not on all keys, and when it happens, it is because the escapement does not slide well enough from the hammer knob.
So it could be a matter of regulation. In any case, the fact that you feel a lot of difference with the pedal may depend on very sluggish damper mechanics, i.e., with center pins that are very stiff, resulting in difficulty for the dampers to lift the dampers themselves. This difference in touch can be reduced by regulating the dampers themselves so that the dampers rise after the halfway point of the hammer stroke.
