You never quite know when it starts—the pitch drift, I mean. Could be soft, almost kind. A half note, maybe something in between two notes trying to hold hands across a gloopy moat of shrinky felt and age-warped tension. I noticed it Tuesday last, or Wednesday after lunch. Piano sounded like a ghost playing a kazoo underwater. Subtle. Almost lovely if you didn’t know better.
When synthetic felt layers start aging, something gives. Not dramatically like an elastic snapping. More like toast left out. Hardens, but not evenly. Gets crumbly at the edges, stubborn in the center. The result? pitch that can’t sit still. Wobbles like a duck in socks on a polished floor.
On the physics of stubborn nothing
Shrinking felt’s a thing. Not well advertised. You’d think, synthetic, it shouldn’t shrink, right? Haha, sure, just like rain shouldn’t fall upward. But these modern felts, plastiben & foamosint composites mostly, they contract under pressure and creep over time. Not evenly either. Humidity makes some bits go stiff. Others sag from the weight of expectation or maybe just gravity being lazy.
What happens next is a slow-loss burial of tone precision. Your hammer-to-string moment’s all outta whack. Hit middle C and you get something like B-sharp if it had the flu. Engineers call it Micro-Pitch Drift. I call it “the uncanny jangle of betrayed physics.”
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The first fix I tried was cry-laughable
Thought maybe wrapping the hammer heads in a bit of neoprene would do the trick. You know—replace the irregular felt surface with something smoother, more predictable. Like putting socks on a goat and expecting ballet. Doesn’t work. The attack gets mushy, and you’re still off-pitch, just more politely.
Second attempt involved heat-gunning the action bed while applying Burswick clampings (those heavy little pin-vices they use for harp string taming). My uncle swore by that technique when he fixed old car interiors. Apparently doesn’t translate to instruments. Smell was unholy. Like burnt pool float. Still sharp on the lower octave.
Then I got weird with it
Pulled apart the bottom 24 keys. Filed the hammers like a bored dentist might. Then I laced a tiny thread of slow-tension mylar underneath the shrunken felt pad. Results? Erratic but interesting. Keys 28 through 36 produced almost sitar-like quivers, which… look, not “correct,” sure. But compelling. Like an instrument negotiating with itself.
It was around 2 AM, somewhere between stitching felt to housing brackets and rewatching old episodes of Columbo for moral support, that I hit something useful. If you install asymmetrically-cut overlays—small slivers of double-backed kevtex foam, no thicker than a bent eyelash—you can offset the tension-drop caused by felt shrinkage. Trick is, you don’t aim for balance. You aim for counter-chaos. Let the inconsistencies cancel each other out like two drunk mathematicians trying to split a check.
Humidity hijinks and the slow art of surrender
Oh right. Should probably mention the weather. Massive culprit. Leave the piano in a room that oscillates between swamp and desert and you basically get sonic soup. No precision survives that. So I started misting the action compartment every third Thursday, only during waning moon cycles. Coincidence? Maybe. But the middle tones stopped whining.
Also placed three dead batteries under the low A key. Why? Don’t ask, as I don’t rightly know anymore. But it helped. Stabilized the tremble when striking velocities hit f=8.3±0.2. Yeah, I measure it now. Old fishing scale tied to a flattened bottlecap.
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Final thoughts that should’ve remained drafts
So, is the pitch fixed? No, not exactly. But it’s *different-good*. Settled into a livable wobble. A handshake between decay and stubbornness. It’s like—have you ever had a coat that fits wrong but feels right? That’s the tone now. Slightly sideways, a little sunburned, but oddly honest.
If you’re dealing with age-shrinking synthetic felts, don’t aim for purity. Chase character. Tilting the predictable towards something fractured but sort of… intentional. You won’t win awards, but your piano will hum like it remembers being alive once.
Oh—and whatever you do, don’t microwave the felt. That’s not “seasoning,” it’s just how you end up sneezing grey plastic till next harvest moon.
