Piano Repair

My piano has been broken for almost two months which has been a bit frustrating.  

It started showing signs of a problem with my pedals one day.  As I was playing a piece, I instantly noticed that the piano was sounding very muddy like I had my foot mashed down on the sustain pedal but I hadn't been using the pedal.  I stopped playing and then played a single staccato note...   the note sustained rather than being a short duration.  I snapped the sustain pedal up and down a few times...  the pedal unit still wasn't working correctly.

I turned the piano off and went around to the other side of the piano to unplug the pedal unit and re-plug it into its jack.  I did that and then started up the piano again.  It seemed okay for a day or two but then the same thing happened again.

Over the course of the next few days, sometimes the pedal unit would sustain all the time, other times it would not respond at all, sometimes it worked as it should.  Most of the time, however, it had a mind of its own and would sustain when I did not want to use the sustain pedal.  Actually, even when not touching the pedals, the pedal unit had a mind of its own.

I cleaned electrical contacts...  no joy.  I reset the entire keyboard...  no joy.

I needed to figure out if this was a pedal unit problem or a motherboard problem inside the piano.  I completely disassembled the pedal unit but found nothing obvious.  There were a few circuit boards in the pedal unit but I saw no obvious signs of something having fried.  

I had a simple cheap sustain pedal on hand (as opposed to the high quality three-pedal unit that normally use) so I figured I should try that one.

This cheap single pedal worked.  It didn't work well....  after all, it is a cheap single pedal...  but it worked when I wanted it to work.  Unfortunately, just because this pedal unit worked, this didn't narrow down my possible problem because this cheap single pedal uses a different jack so I still didn't know if the problem was with the pedal unit or the piano. 

I decided to shop for a new three-pedal unit which then got me to reading reviews.  

I had seen a few bad reviews which mentioned the malfunctioning pedal units doing the same thing that my pedal unit was doing.  This was occurring in pedal units that were only one to three years old.  My pedal unit is about three and a half years old now.  At this point I decided it would make sense to just order a new pedal unit.

The new parts arrived today and, when I found some energy today, I swapped out the old parts for the new parts.  I've only played the piano a total of about a half hour today but, so far, my piano seems to be working as it should.  Actually, it seems to provide a much cleaner sound now.  Perhaps this pedal unit had been starting to fail little by little for months and I didn't realize it?

One thing is certain, I definitely do not like playing with only a cheap sustain pedal.  The quality of the pedal is significantly noticeable while playing.  The pressure required is completely different.  The full travel of the pedal, up to down, is completely different.  How it responds is completely different than a higher quality pedal.  

Also, not having a soft una corda pedal and a sostenudo pedal made me feel like I lost fine control of the piano.  The other big difference between the cheap single sustain pedal and the better three-pedal unit is that the three-pedal unit allows for half pedaling and even creates some of the nuanced pedal sounds which would really be the product of mechanical linkages.  

I'm glad to have my piano in working order again.  

That being said, the perfectionist in me feels my piano really is in need of a keybed overhaul which I have been putting off for months...