3 ms·

I know about wooden frame upright pianos, but grand pianos?

• jacquesm 4y ago
  Yes, in fact that's how it started. The 'upright' was a way to sell pianos to lower income families because it's cheaper to manufacture and easier to situate in a small home. Prior to 1825 all pianos were made of just wood, and played reasonably soft, usually with just one or at most two strings per note (that's where the term Una Corda originally comes from, now it denotes a pedal that (on grand pianos) causes the action to shift a bit to the right so it will miss a string in the higher register). That also made them pretty finicky, changing moisture and temperature would have a significant effect on the pitch of the piano. At that time 'standard pitch' was about A4@423 Hz, considerably below what it is today (A4@440), which lessened the problems somewhat but if you wanted to have your instrument well tuned you had better learn how to tune it yourself. For harpsichord players (the predecessor to the piano) today self tuning is still the standard. Piano history is fascinating, if you are interested in the subject I'd recommend reading 'Of men, women and pianos' by Arthur Loesser. It's an old book but a fantastic source of historical information about the development of the piano/grand piano.