The soundboard is the most crucial part of the piano. In quality pianos the soundboard is
made of solid spruce, that is, spruce boards glued together at the edge. Spruce is chosen
for its high ratio of strength to weight. The best piano makers use close-grained, quarter-
sawn, defect-free spruce and make sure that it has been carefully dried over a long period
of time before making it into soundboards. In some cheaper pianos the soundboard is
made of plywood.
Piano keys are generally made of spruce or basswood for lightness. In high quality
pianos spruce is normally used. Traditionally the black keys were made of ebony and the
white keys were covered with strips of ivory. Since ivory-yielding species are
endangered and protected by treaty, plastics are now almost always used. Yamaha have
developed a plastic, since imitated by others, which simulates the look and feel of ivory.
Every modern piano has at least two pedals, a sustaining pedal and a soft pedal. The
equivalent to the present-day sustaining pedal in eighteenth century pianos consisted of
levers which were pressed upwards by the player’s knees.
The sustaining pedal, also called the damper pedal or, incorrectly, the loud pedal, is
usually simply called the pedal since it is the one most frequently used. It is always at the
right hand of the other pedal(s). The mechanism for each note, except in the top two
octaves, includes a damper, which is a pad that prevents the note’s strings from vibrating.
Normally the damper is raised off the strings whenever the key for that note is pressed.
When the pedal is pressed, however, all the dampers on the piano are lifted at once so
that all the piano strings are free from contact with the dampers.
Use of the pedal assists the pianist to play legato, that is, to play notes in a smooth,
connected manner, and enables the pianist to sustain notes that he or she cannot hold with
the fingers. Use of the pedal also enriches the piano’s tone because, by raising the
dampers, all the strings are left free to vibrate sympathetically with whatever notes are
being played. Pedalling is one of the techniques a pianist must master since piano music
from Chopin on benefits from, and indeed requires, extensive use of the pedal. In
contrast, the pedal was used more sparingly by the composers of the classical period,
such as Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven in his early works.
The soft pedal, or una corda pedal, is always placed at the left hand of the other pedal(s).
On a grand piano the soft pedal shifts the whole action, including the keyboard, slightly
to the right. The result of this is that hammers that normally strike all three of the strings
for a note strike only two of them. This softens the note and modifies its tone quality but
does not change the touch or feel of the action. The soft pedal was invented by Cristofori
and thus it appeared on the very earliest pianos. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries the soft pedal was more effective than it is today, because pianos were made
with only two strings per note and therefore just one string would be struck. This is the
origin of the name ‘una corda’ which is Italian for ‘one string’. In modern pianos there
are three strings per note, except for lower notes which have two and the very lowest