I did it myself to the basement piano that came with our house when I was a kid. It started with thumbtacks or brads pressed into the felt heads for saloon playing cause it was louder.

Posted in Musical Hacks Tagged hammer, honky tonk, keys, pedal, piano, ragtime, soundboard, strings, tone Post navigation And if the hacked piano doesn’t work out as an instrument, you can always turn it into a workbench. Most of the piano hacks we offer tend toward the electronic variety, so it’s nice to see a purely mechanical piano hack for a change. It makes the piano sound a little like a harpsichord, or the aforementioned saloon instrument, and at the touch of a foot, it’s back to its original tone. The completed mandolin rail can be raised and lowered using a new foot pedal, completely changing the tone as the hammers hit the strings with the metal clips rather than their soft felt heads. The curtain was cut into a fringe in the same spacing as the hammers – marking the hammer locations with cornstarch was a nice trick – and metal clips were crimped to each fringe. A wooden rail spanning the entire width of the string board was added, with a curtain of fabric draping down to the level of the hammers. The instrument had seen better days, so step one was disassembly and cleaning. Not so, apparently, as demonstrated by installing a “mandolin rail” in a small upright piano. We always thought that the rich variety of tones that can be coaxed from a piano, from the tinny sound of an Old West saloon piano to the rich tones of a concert grand, were due mainly to the construction of the instrument and the way it’s played. Still, we have to admit that this ragtime piano hack took us by surprise. Few are more complex than the piano, and, as it turns out, few are quite so hackable. We’re partial to musical instrument hacks around here, mainly because we find instruments to be fascinating machines.

Xkcd tiny piano