How do I clean my piano?

Hey everyone, this is Glenn Tribus for Hollywood Piano, and today we're going to talk about a question that comes up all the time, which is, how do I clean my piano? Stay tuned. We're here to talk about how to clean your piano. The question comes up every day. We get calls and emails from people asking, how do we take care of our piano? What do we do? What kind of polish do we use? What kind of cloths do we use? How do we treat it? How should it be done? So, we're here today to talk about that and to go over the different kinds of piano finishes and how to best care for them. So, first of all, let's talk about a high gloss finish. Now, this is very popular today, and high gloss finishes need very little care. So, there are a bunch of no-nos for high gloss finishes. First of all, don't ever clean it with a paper towel. Paper towels are very harsh and they will scratch your piano horribly. A client of ours had their cleaning person clean their piano with a paper towel and it literally scratched the whole thing everywhere. So, never use that. What should you use? Well, the kinds of cloths that they use for cars, for car detailing. An ultra, ultra soft t-shirt that doesn't have any seams in it that could possibly scratch the piano. So, that's the kind of cloth you want to use. As far as what to use on the piano, never, ever use the products that you use for other furniture. For example, don't use something like pledge on your high gloss piano or even on your satin piano. Those add additional residue and for a high gloss piano, it's really not good. For a high gloss piano, what you might want to use is a little bit of water on a very, very soft cloth. You can add a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar to that to clean the fingerprints off. Now, if you want to polish the piano, there are a couple of products you can use. We sell a product from Cory's that is specially made for high gloss pianos and it's a product that allows you to shine the surface without adding any additional residue. If you have a high gloss piano that's very, very badly scratched, there's a product from 3M that we use. That kind of buffs out what's in there, the swirls, the scratches, etc. Now, also, if you want to put a bit of a higher gloss on the piano, there is a product. It's from Meguiar's. It's a plastic polish and you can use that as well. But just be very careful when you put anything on your piano. You don't want anything to drip in between the keys. You can damage the keys by doing that. Also, you want to be very careful about the inside of the piano. You don't want anything to drip on the inside. Now, let's open up the lid of the piano and look inside. So, there's a few things inside you should be aware of. Don't really try to clean the inside of the piano, especially underneath your strings yourself. That's something a piano tuner can do and they have a special tool to get all the way under there. If you're concerned about dust inside your piano, you might want to consider keeping it closed most of the time. Also, there's a felt product that goes above the strings and covers the strings and the sounding board and that keeps dust out and also does a nice job of protecting the strings from corrosion. I have one of those in my own piano. So, inside, if you want to get dust out that's falling between the tuning pins, you can use a little brush, a very soft brush like you might use for painting, but a very, very soft, wide brush, maybe about two or three inches, and you can just gently go between the pins and brush out whatever dust is there. Again, don't do anything on the sounding board. The exposed part of the sounding board, before it goes underneath the strings, you can lightly dust that, but no chemicals, liquids, etc. Just go lightly over that sounding board. For the inner rim of the piano, again, no liquids, no cream, nothing that could potentially drip onto the piano. Again, you would use maybe the slightly dampened cloth to get whatever dust might have fallen. Now, on an upright piano that has a high-gloss finish, you're going to do the same sorts of things we did on the grand piano. Very, very soft cloth, slightly dampened with a little lemon juice or a little bit of vinegar, just a couple of drops, just to help you remove those fingerprints. Again, the same kind of polishing solutions. There's the Cori high-gloss polish and also the plastic polish from New Wires. As far as inside your upright piano, don't go in there and don't touch anything inside of there. If you like, and you have a lid on an upright that opens up, you can lightly dust very carefully the part that opens up, the part that's exposed when you open it, but the rest of it, don't do anything like that. Now, if you happen to have a satin-finished piano, we're going to use some similar techniques. There is a cloth, lightly dampened, but you have to be very careful on a satin-finished piano, especially a grand piano that has rub marks where they've rubbed it with steel wool, and most ebony satin finishes are rubbed with steel wool, so you want to rub in the direction of the rub marks and with a dampened cloth to get any fingerprints off. Now, you don't want to use the Cori high-gloss polish. They have a Cori satin polish, which is basically just to clean it. You don't want to use any Meguiars. You basically don't want to put any polishes on an ebony satin grand piano. You can make a giant mess, and it's like a never-ending thing that keeps going and going and going until you've got every inch of it covered, and then it's still going to look good. Finishes that are not ebony satin but real wood-finished satin pianos, again, you would clean those like you would fine furniture but don't use something like Kledge on there because it's a high moisture content and can damage the wood, so you want to use a very fine furniture polish on the exterior. The interior, follow the same instructions that I mentioned earlier. Uprights as well, just a fine, very fine, high-quality furniture polish on the outside, but mostly you just need to dust and keep it clean. Well, I hope you found this video interesting and informative. Now, all the things that I discussed, we're going to post links to how you can get those things down below, so check out those links and let us know if you have any questions on how to proceed to clean your piano. I hope you found this little video instructive, and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to call us. We're happy to help you and guide you in how to clean and maintain your piano properly. This is Glenn Tribetz for Hollywood Piano, and we want to ask you if you really like this video to like it, comment down below, and don't forget to subscribe to our channel. And remember, there's no life without music, and there's no music without life. Bye for now.