This is a classic turn-of-the-(last)-century Steinway upright that I had the privilege of reconditioning many years ago. The case was refinished and is quite beautiful, but of course I prefer to admire the inner workings.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Steinway & Sons
Another pin-up shot:
This is a classic turn-of-the-(last)-century Steinway upright that I had the privilege of reconditioning many years ago. The case was refinished and is quite beautiful, but of course I prefer to admire the inner workings.
This is a classic turn-of-the-(last)-century Steinway upright that I had the privilege of reconditioning many years ago. The case was refinished and is quite beautiful, but of course I prefer to admire the inner workings.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
So That's Whose Piano It Was
He has so many lying around his shop that he just forgot:
PERTH, Jan 20 2009 AAP General News - A piano tuner accused of stealing a grand piano from a university 12 years ago will face court in Perth.
The 57-year-old from Mount Helena, near Perth's Hills, has been charged by the Corruption and Crime Commission with stealing a Steinway grand piano from the University of Western Australia's music school.
A CCC spokesman said the man allegedly stole the piano 12 years ago when he took it for maintenance at his workshop.
He allegedly sold it for $20,000.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Poole Piano Co
Isn't she beautiful?
I never tire of opening a piano up and gazing upon the action. Those 88 hammers and wippens, those 230-or-so tuning pins and strings, just make my eyes happy. My dad said that I was just like him in this regard. When he was a kid, his mother would give him a handful of pennies to play with, a whole handful of identical objects. He could play with them all day!
I also love those giant bolts and screws on the plate. As a kid, I wanted the screwdriver that could fit those giant screws. My parents wisely kept me away from the screws and focused my attention on playing the keys. But now I own that screwdriver! And I still play those keys! I guess I couldn't be happier.
I never tire of opening a piano up and gazing upon the action. Those 88 hammers and wippens, those 230-or-so tuning pins and strings, just make my eyes happy. My dad said that I was just like him in this regard. When he was a kid, his mother would give him a handful of pennies to play with, a whole handful of identical objects. He could play with them all day!
I also love those giant bolts and screws on the plate. As a kid, I wanted the screwdriver that could fit those giant screws. My parents wisely kept me away from the screws and focused my attention on playing the keys. But now I own that screwdriver! And I still play those keys! I guess I couldn't be happier.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
To His Piano
Old friend, patient of error as of accuracy,
Ready to think the fingerings of thought,
You but a scant year older than I am
With my expectant mother expecting maybe
An infant prodigy among her stars
But getting only little me instead–
To see you standing there for six decades
Containing Chopsticks, Für Elise, and
The Art of Fugue in your burnished rosewood box,
As well as all those years of silence and
The stumbling beginnings the children made,
Who would believe the twenty tons of stress
Your gilded frame's kept stretched out all this while?
- Howard Nemerov
Related website:
The Music Lovers Poetry Anthology
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Hammer Bubbling
This is the second part of a two-part post. The first part is here.
The Baldwin grand was unplayable. All I was supposed to do was tune it, but I couldn't even do that. Every note was bubbling. When the hammer heads hit the strings, rather than making clean strikes, the heads bounced against the strings, striking multiple times. That is called bubbling. Usually when it happens, it happens with a few notes, or with most of one section, but in this case it was over the entire keyboard.
What causes bubbling is that the keystroke is not matched properly to the hammerstroke. When you press a key, it moves a certain distance - this is the keystroke. The movement of the key causes the hammer to move from rest to contact with the string - this is the hammerstroke. If there is too much hammerstroke, or too little keystroke, or too much free play between the key and the hammer, bubbling will result.
There are some quick fixes: you can eliminate the free play (called lost motion), then increase the let-off, or raise the hammerline, or increase the key dip, or raise the key level. The only problem is that each of these corrections may introduce distortion and unevenness to the action regulation. Slight distortions are tolerable, but past a certain point you simply trade one problem for another. Ultimately, bubbling indicates that the action needs a more thorough regulation.
Six months ago I had tuned this piano, and its action seemed fine. Why was it so far off now? I checked my notes, and found that I had had to eliminate some bubbling then. I had also noted evidence of past technicians making quick, ad hoc adjustments to the action. My plan was to regulate the action thoroughly this summer, when time and budget permitted. But I had to do something right now.
There was no lost motion to eliminate. Normally this is good, but I was hoping for a quick solution, and this is the first thing to try. The keystroke felt too shallow, as if the entire key level needed raising. Unfortunately, that's exactly what I did not have the time and budget for now. At a glance I could see that the hammerline was all over the place; that could be quickly adjusted. The let-off was fine, so I decided not to disturb it. Nor did I disturb the front rail punchings under the keys. Then I thought of something else. One reason the regulation would change so drastically from one season to the next would be if the keyframe was not sitting securely on the keybed. There are special bolts called glide bolts for ensuring this, and I made a quick guess that they hadn't been regulated in a very long time. You can sometimes feel the poor seating in the action, a kind of bounciness, and it will change with humidity.
Regulating an action is like solving a Chinese puzzle - each move affects other moves. Some moves need to happen at the beginning, other moves must wait toward the end, and a lot of moves will need to be repeated. Typically the end moves are done regularly, but the beginning moves will be neglected because they necessitate moving through the entire regulation, for which there is often no time and insufficient budget. Regulating the glide bolts is such a beginning move. But today I decided to gamble on an unorthodox move; I would screw down the glide bolts far enough to actually raise the key level just a little. It's a hack, but a creative one.
I adjusted the glide bolts, raising the key level just enough to help with the bubbling but not so far as to cause other problems. Then I raised the hammerline as far as necessary to eliminate the bubbling, even at the risk of reducing the hammerstroke a little too much. For a handful of notes there was cause to increase the let-off a hair. The bubbling was gone, the action felt a little odd, but it was playable, and perfectly fine for a practice piano. It had taken a little over an hour, thus preserving the budget and not eating up too much time. But I will have to regulate it properly from top to bottom soon - any more creative hacking will just make things worse. Thank heavens there won't be another technician after me to say "What the hell was this guy thinking!"
The Baldwin grand was unplayable. All I was supposed to do was tune it, but I couldn't even do that. Every note was bubbling. When the hammer heads hit the strings, rather than making clean strikes, the heads bounced against the strings, striking multiple times. That is called bubbling. Usually when it happens, it happens with a few notes, or with most of one section, but in this case it was over the entire keyboard.
What causes bubbling is that the keystroke is not matched properly to the hammerstroke. When you press a key, it moves a certain distance - this is the keystroke. The movement of the key causes the hammer to move from rest to contact with the string - this is the hammerstroke. If there is too much hammerstroke, or too little keystroke, or too much free play between the key and the hammer, bubbling will result.
There are some quick fixes: you can eliminate the free play (called lost motion), then increase the let-off, or raise the hammerline, or increase the key dip, or raise the key level. The only problem is that each of these corrections may introduce distortion and unevenness to the action regulation. Slight distortions are tolerable, but past a certain point you simply trade one problem for another. Ultimately, bubbling indicates that the action needs a more thorough regulation.
Six months ago I had tuned this piano, and its action seemed fine. Why was it so far off now? I checked my notes, and found that I had had to eliminate some bubbling then. I had also noted evidence of past technicians making quick, ad hoc adjustments to the action. My plan was to regulate the action thoroughly this summer, when time and budget permitted. But I had to do something right now.
There was no lost motion to eliminate. Normally this is good, but I was hoping for a quick solution, and this is the first thing to try. The keystroke felt too shallow, as if the entire key level needed raising. Unfortunately, that's exactly what I did not have the time and budget for now. At a glance I could see that the hammerline was all over the place; that could be quickly adjusted. The let-off was fine, so I decided not to disturb it. Nor did I disturb the front rail punchings under the keys. Then I thought of something else. One reason the regulation would change so drastically from one season to the next would be if the keyframe was not sitting securely on the keybed. There are special bolts called glide bolts for ensuring this, and I made a quick guess that they hadn't been regulated in a very long time. You can sometimes feel the poor seating in the action, a kind of bounciness, and it will change with humidity.
Regulating an action is like solving a Chinese puzzle - each move affects other moves. Some moves need to happen at the beginning, other moves must wait toward the end, and a lot of moves will need to be repeated. Typically the end moves are done regularly, but the beginning moves will be neglected because they necessitate moving through the entire regulation, for which there is often no time and insufficient budget. Regulating the glide bolts is such a beginning move. But today I decided to gamble on an unorthodox move; I would screw down the glide bolts far enough to actually raise the key level just a little. It's a hack, but a creative one.
I adjusted the glide bolts, raising the key level just enough to help with the bubbling but not so far as to cause other problems. Then I raised the hammerline as far as necessary to eliminate the bubbling, even at the risk of reducing the hammerstroke a little too much. For a handful of notes there was cause to increase the let-off a hair. The bubbling was gone, the action felt a little odd, but it was playable, and perfectly fine for a practice piano. It had taken a little over an hour, thus preserving the budget and not eating up too much time. But I will have to regulate it properly from top to bottom soon - any more creative hacking will just make things worse. Thank heavens there won't be another technician after me to say "What the hell was this guy thinking!"
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Creativity or Incompetence?
This is the first part of a two-part post. The second part is here.
The line between creative problem-solving and hack-work is blurry. A solution acceptable to one may be unacceptable to another. There is room for disagreement, and circumstances are never so clear as to make the best solution obvious. Budgets need to be adhered to, piano usage differs, pianos vary in quality, time is an ingredient. The main difference between hack-work and creative problem-solving is in the use of judgement. Was a repair made hastily with little thinking about the full effects? Was a repair executed poorly for lack of insight about materials or mechanisms? Were money and time not spent out of mere stinginess?
When I was working in a rebuilding shop, the movers one day rolled in a small upright which we promptly took apart and examined. One look at the bass bridge, and we all began laughing and pointing. Some poor soul had attempted to repair the bridge with hilariously disastrous results. Later, one of the crew admitted to having done the work years before, and insisted that it had been a creative solution. It sure looked like hack-work to the rest of us, though.
What this technician had encountered was a bass bridge that had split along the pin line - a common occurrence. Apparently many of the bridge pins had actually fallen out, the rest had shifted well out of place, and the unmoored bass strings were buzzing like crazy. Some people might have said forget it, the piano is junk - it was of mediocre quality to begin with, and the split bridge could have been indicative of many other problems throughout the piano.
The "proper" way to fix the bridge would have been to move the piano to a shop, flip it on its back, remove the trap and pedalwork, loosen the bass strings and move them aside, remove the bass bridge and make and install a replacement. But the sort of owners who have a piano like this are usually the sort who cannot afford such a procedure. Is there a creative solution between these extremes?
Our beleaguered technician tried this: he would fill the crack with epoxy, and then drive in new pins. It wasn't the best idea, and executed poorly it could be a disaster, and without the proper setup it would be cumbersome work, but that's what he did. And he ran into difficulties.
Epoxy does have gap-filling ability, but there is a limit. A narrow crack can be sealed, but this was a canyon he was trying to fill. I'm sure he discovered that you can't draw a cracked bridge back together by clamping, either. And a bridge pin driven into epoxy is not going to hold the way it does in wood. At best this would be an impermanent repair that would perhaps alter the scaling of the bass section and not allow the bass strings to correctly sit on the bridge. But it might eliminate the buzzing and allow for tuning, however temporary, and at little cost. It's potentially a creative solution for the conditions, even given the limitations.
Here's where it all went wrong: the technician had no extra bridge pins, and he hadn't given himself the time to order them and wait for the shipment. He tried making his own by cutting the ends off of small common nails. Even this is creative and not entirely incorrect. A bridge pin does look like the end of a nail. If you did it correctly and carefully you could make a batch of bridge pins this way. But the technician was running out of time, and time is money.
Bridge pins might look like small nails, but they are not installed the way nails are. They are not driven into the bridge, and if you try it you'll see why. Holes of the proper diameter and angle must be drilled first, and the pins are then tapped in. There should be enough friction to hold the pins securely. Our intrepid technician overlooked this detail, and with bridge pins/nails in hand, proceeded to hammer away. The pins ended up angled every which way, some mashed and bent, and not exactly lined up properly. The epoxy set, and for good or ill our man was done.
To his credit, he had eliminated the buzzing, and the piano could be tuned well enough for his customer, who was happy to have not been billed a lot of money for the work. Over time, the epoxy had held, though I'm sure the pins had drifted, and maybe the buzzing had started to come back. I'm sure it was more work and hassle for the technician than it was worth, and ultimately embarrassing.
Next: my turn.
The line between creative problem-solving and hack-work is blurry. A solution acceptable to one may be unacceptable to another. There is room for disagreement, and circumstances are never so clear as to make the best solution obvious. Budgets need to be adhered to, piano usage differs, pianos vary in quality, time is an ingredient. The main difference between hack-work and creative problem-solving is in the use of judgement. Was a repair made hastily with little thinking about the full effects? Was a repair executed poorly for lack of insight about materials or mechanisms? Were money and time not spent out of mere stinginess?
When I was working in a rebuilding shop, the movers one day rolled in a small upright which we promptly took apart and examined. One look at the bass bridge, and we all began laughing and pointing. Some poor soul had attempted to repair the bridge with hilariously disastrous results. Later, one of the crew admitted to having done the work years before, and insisted that it had been a creative solution. It sure looked like hack-work to the rest of us, though.
What this technician had encountered was a bass bridge that had split along the pin line - a common occurrence. Apparently many of the bridge pins had actually fallen out, the rest had shifted well out of place, and the unmoored bass strings were buzzing like crazy. Some people might have said forget it, the piano is junk - it was of mediocre quality to begin with, and the split bridge could have been indicative of many other problems throughout the piano.
The "proper" way to fix the bridge would have been to move the piano to a shop, flip it on its back, remove the trap and pedalwork, loosen the bass strings and move them aside, remove the bass bridge and make and install a replacement. But the sort of owners who have a piano like this are usually the sort who cannot afford such a procedure. Is there a creative solution between these extremes?
Our beleaguered technician tried this: he would fill the crack with epoxy, and then drive in new pins. It wasn't the best idea, and executed poorly it could be a disaster, and without the proper setup it would be cumbersome work, but that's what he did. And he ran into difficulties.
Epoxy does have gap-filling ability, but there is a limit. A narrow crack can be sealed, but this was a canyon he was trying to fill. I'm sure he discovered that you can't draw a cracked bridge back together by clamping, either. And a bridge pin driven into epoxy is not going to hold the way it does in wood. At best this would be an impermanent repair that would perhaps alter the scaling of the bass section and not allow the bass strings to correctly sit on the bridge. But it might eliminate the buzzing and allow for tuning, however temporary, and at little cost. It's potentially a creative solution for the conditions, even given the limitations.
Here's where it all went wrong: the technician had no extra bridge pins, and he hadn't given himself the time to order them and wait for the shipment. He tried making his own by cutting the ends off of small common nails. Even this is creative and not entirely incorrect. A bridge pin does look like the end of a nail. If you did it correctly and carefully you could make a batch of bridge pins this way. But the technician was running out of time, and time is money.
Bridge pins might look like small nails, but they are not installed the way nails are. They are not driven into the bridge, and if you try it you'll see why. Holes of the proper diameter and angle must be drilled first, and the pins are then tapped in. There should be enough friction to hold the pins securely. Our intrepid technician overlooked this detail, and with bridge pins/nails in hand, proceeded to hammer away. The pins ended up angled every which way, some mashed and bent, and not exactly lined up properly. The epoxy set, and for good or ill our man was done.
To his credit, he had eliminated the buzzing, and the piano could be tuned well enough for his customer, who was happy to have not been billed a lot of money for the work. Over time, the epoxy had held, though I'm sure the pins had drifted, and maybe the buzzing had started to come back. I'm sure it was more work and hassle for the technician than it was worth, and ultimately embarrassing.
Next: my turn.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Nice Piece of Trapwork
I found a design flaw in a Boston grand. Boston is the brand designed by Steinway and built by the Kawai factory in Japan. They're really beautiful pianos.
The notes were making a clanking sound, and I guessed the problem right away. I could feel it - the dampers were jumping up too high at the end of the keystroke, and instead of being stopped by the stop rail, they were hitting the metal sostenuto rail.
So the damper stop rail was positioned too high. That's easy enough to fix, but I had to find out first why the rail was out of position. The usual culprit is that the damper pedal isn't being properly stopped. As a result, every time the pedal is depressed, the damper tray pushes all the dampers hard into the stop rail. Over time this succeeds in pushing the damper stop rail up out of the way. Hence, clanking.
The usual way to stop the damper pedal is by stopping the damper trap lever, which the pedal moves by pushing up on the pedal rod. I got under the piano and took a look. The stop consisted of a capstan screwed into the case underside. Whenever the pedal was depressed, a piece of felt glued to the top of the lever contacted the capstan, stopping the lever. The capstan made it adjustable, the felt reduced noise. The felt, though, was soft - it was the kind of woven felt used for the hammer rail in an upright. The capstan was quite small, and it had driven a divot into the soft felt, rendering the stop useless.
I thought of simply adjusting the capstan, but I would have had to adjust it quite a bit, which is not a lot of fun to do lying on one's back. The possibilities also existed that the capstan might not have been long enough to fill the gap, and that the felt was now too thin at the contact point to provide any padding. I also thought of simply adding more felt, but the misshapen felt really needed replacing, so I removed the trap lever from the piano.
If there's anyplace where a manufacturer is going to try to save money, it's the trapwork. But this was the most beautifully made trap lever I had ever seen. The coil spring sat in a lovely felt-lined cup, and had a piece of felt carefully woven through it to avoid creaking. The pitman sat on a buckskin/felt cushion inlay, and there was a generous piece of hard leather where the pedal rod made contact. There even was a piece of buckskin wrapped across the bottom and up the side of the lever to protect it from contact with the guide hook. The only flaw was the soft stop felt. What was needed was a chunk of hard felt, like the kind used for hammer heads, and that's what I installed.
The design error was that the felt was too soft for the capstan. If the capstan had been much larger in diameter, and therefore exerting less pressure (pressure = force/surface area), it might have worked. I was actually tempted to remove the capstan and install the traditional stop: a piece of wood glued to the underside of the case, with the hard felt attached to it, and no felt on the lever itself. This works well, and eliminates the possibility of a divot, but it's not as easy to adjust. So I'll have to keep an eye on my new stop felt; this piano gets a lot of use.
The notes were making a clanking sound, and I guessed the problem right away. I could feel it - the dampers were jumping up too high at the end of the keystroke, and instead of being stopped by the stop rail, they were hitting the metal sostenuto rail.
So the damper stop rail was positioned too high. That's easy enough to fix, but I had to find out first why the rail was out of position. The usual culprit is that the damper pedal isn't being properly stopped. As a result, every time the pedal is depressed, the damper tray pushes all the dampers hard into the stop rail. Over time this succeeds in pushing the damper stop rail up out of the way. Hence, clanking.
The usual way to stop the damper pedal is by stopping the damper trap lever, which the pedal moves by pushing up on the pedal rod. I got under the piano and took a look. The stop consisted of a capstan screwed into the case underside. Whenever the pedal was depressed, a piece of felt glued to the top of the lever contacted the capstan, stopping the lever. The capstan made it adjustable, the felt reduced noise. The felt, though, was soft - it was the kind of woven felt used for the hammer rail in an upright. The capstan was quite small, and it had driven a divot into the soft felt, rendering the stop useless.
I thought of simply adjusting the capstan, but I would have had to adjust it quite a bit, which is not a lot of fun to do lying on one's back. The possibilities also existed that the capstan might not have been long enough to fill the gap, and that the felt was now too thin at the contact point to provide any padding. I also thought of simply adding more felt, but the misshapen felt really needed replacing, so I removed the trap lever from the piano.
If there's anyplace where a manufacturer is going to try to save money, it's the trapwork. But this was the most beautifully made trap lever I had ever seen. The coil spring sat in a lovely felt-lined cup, and had a piece of felt carefully woven through it to avoid creaking. The pitman sat on a buckskin/felt cushion inlay, and there was a generous piece of hard leather where the pedal rod made contact. There even was a piece of buckskin wrapped across the bottom and up the side of the lever to protect it from contact with the guide hook. The only flaw was the soft stop felt. What was needed was a chunk of hard felt, like the kind used for hammer heads, and that's what I installed.
The design error was that the felt was too soft for the capstan. If the capstan had been much larger in diameter, and therefore exerting less pressure (pressure = force/surface area), it might have worked. I was actually tempted to remove the capstan and install the traditional stop: a piece of wood glued to the underside of the case, with the hard felt attached to it, and no felt on the lever itself. This works well, and eliminates the possibility of a divot, but it's not as easy to adjust. So I'll have to keep an eye on my new stop felt; this piano gets a lot of use.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
How Pianos Are Stolen
Let's say you're the principal of a junior high school, and in your auditorium is a Steinway grand that was probably bought during the Truman Administration. Let's say it hasn't been maintained in a long time, and no one much uses it. Several generations of kids have carved their names in it, ivories are missing, some notes don't work.
One of your faculty is very excited about putting on a musical production, so, of course, the piano needs tuning, to say the least. You look in the Yellow Pages, and a piano dealer has a big, impressive ad, so you call. They send over a tuner who, it turns out, is a sales rep as well.
The tuner tries his best, snaps a couple of strings, and then announces that the piano really needs a lot of work, which you don't doubt. You're afraid to ask, but you go ahead; "How much work?" "Well, quite a bit," he says, "in fact, it needs a complete rebuilding." "How much will that cost?" you ask nervously. Maybe he tells you right there, or maybe he writes up an appraisal and estimate, but either way the number is uncomfortably close to $12,000. Of course it is out of the question. What will you do?
"Well it just so happens," says the tuner, reading your mind, "we've just finished rebuilding a lovely little grand piano, it's quite nice, and everything works and it's in tune already. Tell you what, we'll make an even trade, the freshly rebuilt grand for this old, run-down grand you have here."
If you say yes, it's a deal, you've just had your piano stolen.
Here's how it works. First, if your piano is a highly valued piano, like a Steinway or a Mason & Hamlin, or even a second-tier piano, like a Baldwin or something unheard of, like a Gabler or a Henry F Miller, then it is pretty valuable, even beat up and needing a ton of work. In other words, it is worth it to have the work done, because the piano will be that much more valuable. A beat-up Steinway can be worth $10,000 because after having another $10,000 of rebuilding work done, it'll be worth more than $20,000. You certainly wouldn't know this by looking at or playing that beat-up piano.
Second, if, as is likely, you couldn't afford $10,000 of rebuilding, chances are you could easily afford a couple of hundred dollars of repair, and that would probably put the piano in perfectly good shape for your musical. But the tuner didn't give you that option, so how would you know?
Third, what do you know about that recently-rebuilt grand? It probably wasn't really rebuilt, just reconditioned, with a few felts replaced, the hammers reshaped, and the pitch raised. Big deal, it's probably a no-name piano worth $3,000 tops.
Get that second opinion before making a decision!
One of your faculty is very excited about putting on a musical production, so, of course, the piano needs tuning, to say the least. You look in the Yellow Pages, and a piano dealer has a big, impressive ad, so you call. They send over a tuner who, it turns out, is a sales rep as well.
The tuner tries his best, snaps a couple of strings, and then announces that the piano really needs a lot of work, which you don't doubt. You're afraid to ask, but you go ahead; "How much work?" "Well, quite a bit," he says, "in fact, it needs a complete rebuilding." "How much will that cost?" you ask nervously. Maybe he tells you right there, or maybe he writes up an appraisal and estimate, but either way the number is uncomfortably close to $12,000. Of course it is out of the question. What will you do?
"Well it just so happens," says the tuner, reading your mind, "we've just finished rebuilding a lovely little grand piano, it's quite nice, and everything works and it's in tune already. Tell you what, we'll make an even trade, the freshly rebuilt grand for this old, run-down grand you have here."
If you say yes, it's a deal, you've just had your piano stolen.
Here's how it works. First, if your piano is a highly valued piano, like a Steinway or a Mason & Hamlin, or even a second-tier piano, like a Baldwin or something unheard of, like a Gabler or a Henry F Miller, then it is pretty valuable, even beat up and needing a ton of work. In other words, it is worth it to have the work done, because the piano will be that much more valuable. A beat-up Steinway can be worth $10,000 because after having another $10,000 of rebuilding work done, it'll be worth more than $20,000. You certainly wouldn't know this by looking at or playing that beat-up piano.
Second, if, as is likely, you couldn't afford $10,000 of rebuilding, chances are you could easily afford a couple of hundred dollars of repair, and that would probably put the piano in perfectly good shape for your musical. But the tuner didn't give you that option, so how would you know?
Third, what do you know about that recently-rebuilt grand? It probably wasn't really rebuilt, just reconditioned, with a few felts replaced, the hammers reshaped, and the pitch raised. Big deal, it's probably a no-name piano worth $3,000 tops.
Get that second opinion before making a decision!
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Moving Pianos
I've moved a lot of pianos. For years I worked with a guy, a big guy, who was brilliant at getting pianos up and down stairs, around corners, through windows and doors. You don't have to be Atlas, but being tall helps. Mostly you have to be smart - there is A Way To Do It, and you go step by step. Patience is a virtue.
Moving a piano does not require a lot of people, as everyone imagines - three people at most, with a fourth to set dollies and open doors. Any more, and they just get in the way. It's also incredibly important that one person give the commands and the others follow. This has to be agreed upon before going any further. Everyone going his own way is a recipe for injury and disaster.
I get asked a lot to help with or supervise a moving, and it's always a tricky matter. It can go like this: twelve guys with bulging muscles show up, prepared to do battle with the piano. I'm a little guy, so they take one look at me, and that's the end of listening to anything I have to say. Then they proceed to argue loudly over how to do this. At this point I walk out, leaving them to their ignorance. Usually, though, because I'm older now and can assert some authority, the helpers will eventually listen, aware that they can really hurt themselves, and then everything goes well. Most of them end up standing around drinking the congratulatory end-of-the-move beer while three of us do the actual moving.
Years ago I helped a friend move a grand piano to his house from the other side of the city. He rounded up an impressive collection of enthusiastic helpers who had really psyched themselves up. I showed up with a moving truck, a couple of ramps, a skid, assorted dollies, blankets, and tools for dismantling the piano. No one had ever seen this done before. They seemed to have a picture in mind that they were going to surround the piano, mightily heave ho, and walk it all the way across Providence. They were fascinated with my approach, but a little disappointed with the lack of drama and sweat. No one refused the beer afterwards, though.
Moving a piano does not require a lot of people, as everyone imagines - three people at most, with a fourth to set dollies and open doors. Any more, and they just get in the way. It's also incredibly important that one person give the commands and the others follow. This has to be agreed upon before going any further. Everyone going his own way is a recipe for injury and disaster.
I get asked a lot to help with or supervise a moving, and it's always a tricky matter. It can go like this: twelve guys with bulging muscles show up, prepared to do battle with the piano. I'm a little guy, so they take one look at me, and that's the end of listening to anything I have to say. Then they proceed to argue loudly over how to do this. At this point I walk out, leaving them to their ignorance. Usually, though, because I'm older now and can assert some authority, the helpers will eventually listen, aware that they can really hurt themselves, and then everything goes well. Most of them end up standing around drinking the congratulatory end-of-the-move beer while three of us do the actual moving.
Years ago I helped a friend move a grand piano to his house from the other side of the city. He rounded up an impressive collection of enthusiastic helpers who had really psyched themselves up. I showed up with a moving truck, a couple of ramps, a skid, assorted dollies, blankets, and tools for dismantling the piano. No one had ever seen this done before. They seemed to have a picture in mind that they were going to surround the piano, mightily heave ho, and walk it all the way across Providence. They were fascinated with my approach, but a little disappointed with the lack of drama and sweat. No one refused the beer afterwards, though.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
The Piano Paid for Itself
It's always entertaining to open up a piano and discover things that shouldn't be there. Pens and pencils are pretty much at the top of the list, with paperclips a close second. Grand pianos seem especially prone to swallowing things - the open fallboard is shaped just right to funnel these things down and into the action. Pennies, dimes, and nickels are notorious for finding their way into the spaces between the keys. Rounding out the collection are: playing cards and postcards; pieces of children's toys; bits of candy; crayons; nuts and seeds stored by mice (and their little poops); rubber mutes, small piano parts, and bits of felt and paper and wood left by previous tuners.
Things often show up on the floor of uprights, behind the bottom board. My favorite is the old glass jar that held water a million years ago, meant to humidify the piano. I found a piano with what appeared to be the entire contents of a file cabinet drawer stuffed down there, perhaps by a child delighted to find a slot above the board at the right height that could swallow paper endlessly. Piano tuners sometimes store broken bass strings down there, or other things that they intend to repair some day.
Does anyone know what this is? My customer today handed it to me, having found it somewhere inside her piano. It was in a plastic bag with a few ancient bass strings. This must be what piano tuners do, she had imagined, store their tools inside their customers' pianos. It's a tuning wrench of some sort, quite old it seems, with tuning tips welded at both ends. The tips have square openings, and they are oriented nearly 90 degrees to each other, so it's an offset tuning wrench. But I can't imagine what it would be used for. It would be too awkward for regular tuning - maybe it's for extracting tuning pins after the strings have been removed.
People always want to know if I find money inside pianos. Aside from the aforementioned pennies and dimes, I have been enriched by the occasional quarters I find. But one time I removed the bottom board of a spinet and found a wad of cash, which I handed to the owner. There was just enough money to pay for the tuning.
Things often show up on the floor of uprights, behind the bottom board. My favorite is the old glass jar that held water a million years ago, meant to humidify the piano. I found a piano with what appeared to be the entire contents of a file cabinet drawer stuffed down there, perhaps by a child delighted to find a slot above the board at the right height that could swallow paper endlessly. Piano tuners sometimes store broken bass strings down there, or other things that they intend to repair some day.
Does anyone know what this is? My customer today handed it to me, having found it somewhere inside her piano. It was in a plastic bag with a few ancient bass strings. This must be what piano tuners do, she had imagined, store their tools inside their customers' pianos. It's a tuning wrench of some sort, quite old it seems, with tuning tips welded at both ends. The tips have square openings, and they are oriented nearly 90 degrees to each other, so it's an offset tuning wrench. But I can't imagine what it would be used for. It would be too awkward for regular tuning - maybe it's for extracting tuning pins after the strings have been removed.People always want to know if I find money inside pianos. Aside from the aforementioned pennies and dimes, I have been enriched by the occasional quarters I find. But one time I removed the bottom board of a spinet and found a wad of cash, which I handed to the owner. There was just enough money to pay for the tuning.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
The End
When I finish a tuning at a customer's home, I usually run through a bunch of major arpeggios up and down the piano. Then I finish off with a big C11 arpeggio. It's just a habit, but it serves a couple of purposes. First, I'm just "tasting" the piano's tone, now that it's in tune. Second, I'm quickly checking octaves to make sure one or more sections haven't shifted during the tuning. Third, I'm signaling to the customer that I'm done.
Sometimes after I close up the piano, the customer, or, more likely, the customer's child, will sit and play a bit. And I don't know why, but the piano always sounds a little out of tune to me, even though when I played it I was satisfied. Maybe it's because the piano sounds different from a different vantage point, or I'm just paranoid about the quality of my unisons. I've learned to not respond to my apparently distorted perception - I listen to and applaud the child, or marvel at the octogenarian ripping off some ragtime, or sit quietly and write out my bill.
But I do love it when I leave the house, and as I get into my car, I can hear my customer in the house, playing up a storm.
Sometimes after I close up the piano, the customer, or, more likely, the customer's child, will sit and play a bit. And I don't know why, but the piano always sounds a little out of tune to me, even though when I played it I was satisfied. Maybe it's because the piano sounds different from a different vantage point, or I'm just paranoid about the quality of my unisons. I've learned to not respond to my apparently distorted perception - I listen to and applaud the child, or marvel at the octogenarian ripping off some ragtime, or sit quietly and write out my bill.
But I do love it when I leave the house, and as I get into my car, I can hear my customer in the house, playing up a storm.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
The Only Thing They've Done Wrong
The dampers in a piano run from the first note up to about the 68th note, the E two octaves above middle C, which is called E6. After that, there really is no need for dampers because the strings don't ring out for very long. Some pianos run dampers 5 or 6 notes above E6, but most piano manufacturers avoid the extra cost and stop at E6 (or try to cut it a bit short one or two notes).
Most of the time you don't notice where the dampers leave off, but a sensitive player will always notice. Sometimes it can be annoying, because the notes just after the last damper can't really be played staccato, and the transition from damper to no-damper is abrupt both for the hand and for the ear.
In an attempt to ameliorate this abrupt transition, Yamaha uses a partial damper felt on its last damper, E6. The idea is that D#6 damps fully, E6 damps partially, and F6 damps not at all - voilà, a smooth transition! Except not really. It's a nice idea, and probably a nice marketing point, but listen carefully to the transition, and you might hear what I'm hearing as the notes die out.
The sound in a piano comes from hammers hitting strings. As soon as a string is struck, it vibrates and transmits most of its energy ultimately to the soundboard, thence to the air as sound waves. As the string gives up its energy, the volume of the sound decreases, a process called decay. Decay begins immediately after the string is struck, and is rapid at first, but then the decay rate drops quickly. In a good piano, the decay rate slows significantly; the string can ring out, at a moderate yet still decreasing volume, for a long time.
Here's my beef with Yamaha's partial damper. D#6, E6, and F6 all have a similar decay, as one would hope. D#6 can also have its sound damped, and F6 cannot. But when you damp E6, only two of the three strings are damped. The third string rings out, but it decays at a significantly different rate than F6. Instead of hearing a smooth transition, I actually hear two different transitions; the one from D#6 to E6, and the one from E6 to F6. Call me sensitive, but it drives me crazy; I'd rather have the one abrupt transition.
The reason the decay is different, by the way, is because a single string transfers energy to the soundboard differently than three strings vibrating in phase. Of course, the difference is greater in the early part of the decay. Towards the end of the decay, the difference is negligible to none. But if you're relying on the damper to do its job, you usually want to apply it in the early part of the decay.
Well, if this is all Yamaha has done wrong, they're doing OK. But I've noticed a growing number of manufacturers mimicking Yamaha's partial damper, and it can't be because it works so well.
Most of the time you don't notice where the dampers leave off, but a sensitive player will always notice. Sometimes it can be annoying, because the notes just after the last damper can't really be played staccato, and the transition from damper to no-damper is abrupt both for the hand and for the ear.
In an attempt to ameliorate this abrupt transition, Yamaha uses a partial damper felt on its last damper, E6. The idea is that D#6 damps fully, E6 damps partially, and F6 damps not at all - voilà, a smooth transition! Except not really. It's a nice idea, and probably a nice marketing point, but listen carefully to the transition, and you might hear what I'm hearing as the notes die out.
The sound in a piano comes from hammers hitting strings. As soon as a string is struck, it vibrates and transmits most of its energy ultimately to the soundboard, thence to the air as sound waves. As the string gives up its energy, the volume of the sound decreases, a process called decay. Decay begins immediately after the string is struck, and is rapid at first, but then the decay rate drops quickly. In a good piano, the decay rate slows significantly; the string can ring out, at a moderate yet still decreasing volume, for a long time.
Here's my beef with Yamaha's partial damper. D#6, E6, and F6 all have a similar decay, as one would hope. D#6 can also have its sound damped, and F6 cannot. But when you damp E6, only two of the three strings are damped. The third string rings out, but it decays at a significantly different rate than F6. Instead of hearing a smooth transition, I actually hear two different transitions; the one from D#6 to E6, and the one from E6 to F6. Call me sensitive, but it drives me crazy; I'd rather have the one abrupt transition.
The reason the decay is different, by the way, is because a single string transfers energy to the soundboard differently than three strings vibrating in phase. Of course, the difference is greater in the early part of the decay. Towards the end of the decay, the difference is negligible to none. But if you're relying on the damper to do its job, you usually want to apply it in the early part of the decay.
Well, if this is all Yamaha has done wrong, they're doing OK. But I've noticed a growing number of manufacturers mimicking Yamaha's partial damper, and it can't be because it works so well.
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