Never Did That Before!

One thing I love about my appointment book is that I don't have to remember what I'm doing next.  I just look in the book to see what's next.  My wife is always asking me, "So where are you going tomorrow?"  I always cheerfully reply, "I have no idea, it's written in the book."

One morning, after consulting my book, I prepared myself for the day and headed off.  I was going to be tuning first at the home of a loyal and regular customer with a somewhat common name - let's just call him Smith.  I arrived at Smith's house and rang the bell.  A man answered the door, and I recognized him as a neighbor I had once met.  I explained that I was there to tune the piano, and he explained that he was babysitting until Mr Smith came home.  Smith hadn't said anything about my arrival, but the sitter let me in, and I started work.

About halfway throught the tuning, Mr Smith came home.  He was happy to see me, but confused.  "Not that it's a problem, but I thought you were coming tomorrow," he said.  I assured him that the appointment was for today - it was in my book, after all.  I checked the book just to be sure, and to my horror I saw that my customer was right.  So where was I supposed to be? At the home of a different Smith!

I also write the town next to the customer's name in my book, and I had failed to register the difference between today's Smith and tomorrow's.  I had seen the name, I knew where he lived, and had driven there.  Mr Smith was quite gracious - if I had to leave and come back tomorrow, that would be fine.  I called Mrs Smith, who had been waiting patiently for me in the other town, and apologized.  I explained what had happened, and she thought it was pretty funny.  Not to worry, it was OK with her that I come tomorrow, she said.  I thanked her, hung up, and finished Mr Smith's piano.  Writing information down is one thing, remembering to read it carefully is another!

This Old Piano

I've been trying to help a woman who inherited an old grand piano.  She has no place for it, and doesn't want to go through the trouble of selling it (it would not fetch much).  She has found someone to give the piano to, but he's very nervous about maintenance costs.

They each consulted local piano technicians.  Her technician worked for a piano dealer, so he pronounced the piano a piece of junk, and suggested they get rid of it and buy one of his.  All this did was make everyone paranoid about the piano's condition.

His technician was a full-time rebuilder.  He loved the piano, said it was wonderful, and suggested that $14,000 would be sufficient to bring it back to life.  All this did was make everyone paranoid about the cost of piano maintenance.

Neither of these technicians said anything wrong.  They were merely talking up their lines of business.  Dealers sell, rebuilders rebuild.  Ordinary piano owners, however, don't know about these distinctions among technicians.

The woman contacted me through a mutual friend, and I tried to help her over the phone.  Because my specialty is repair, I of course suggested repairing the piano.  I gave her an idea of what it might cost, based on her description of what the other technicians had said, but I cautioned that without inspecting the piano, I couldn't be sure.  The problem was that the piano was three hours away from me.

After a number of phone conversations, I thought what the hell, and arranged to go see the piano, giving the owner a break on the cost, friend to friend.  I was also thinking, though, that if there was enough work and the means to pay for it, and if I could be put up for a few nights, it could work for me.  I did this once for a family near New York City.  They had a spare apartment, and room in the basement for a makeshift shop, and I spent a week reconditioning their old Steinway upright.  They fed me dinner each night (with wine!)

The piano was exactly what I expected: about seventy years old, worn but not abused, no significant damage, playable.  It had been an upper quality piano out of the factory.  Someone had done a pretty good job of replacing the hammerheads at some point, and the bass strings and tuning pins were replacements, too.  The piano was even at concert pitch! I could have just tuned it, and it would have been fine for casual use or beginner's lessons.  I drew up a list of things worth doing, all those little maintenance things that had gotten overlooked over the years.  It was a great candidate for rebuilding, if anyone had the money.  Otherwise, it could be used for another decade, maybe two, but not for professional or heavy use.  I would have been happy to do the work.

The intended recipient has been speaking with me, still nervous about long-term maintenance costs, whether the piano is "worth it," wondering if I would do the work piecemeal.  I just wrote him a long email, and I thought I'd post some of it here.

The reason why you can find old pianos for free or cheap is because they all need work, and continue needing work.  In fact, new pianos need maintenance too, but it gets put off until finally the piano is unplayable and needs a lot of work all at once.  Things then just get worse as the maintenance is put off for decades.

An old piano is like an old car - you expect it to need repairs regularly.  It just gets worn down.  Things loosen or come unglued here and there, it starts making noises.  Some of this is easily corrected (depending on who you talk to), the rest you just let go.  The key is finding the person who will keep your piano going and not try to gouge money out of you.  Like finding the car mechanic who will keep your old clunker going enough to get to the grocery store on a regular basis.  The only time you run into trouble is with a piano tuner who doesn't want to do repairs, and who tries to sell you something else, like a new piano or a full rebuilding.  Those things are fine if that's what you want.  Otherwise, stick with the guy willing to do repairs and you'll be OK.

Here's my advice.  Take the piano, it's a pretty OK piano.  Find someone to come and tune it.  If he (or she) says it can't be tuned, or it needs to be rebuilt, throw him out and find someone else.  If he says there might be a little work needed with the tuning pins to hold the tension, then let him do a little work.  Only a little.  If he says your soundboard has cracks, say "Yes, I know," and leave it at that.

Then play it.  It's already playable, just needs the tuning.

Later, say a year or two or three from now, you'll have a better sense of what you'd like from the instrument.  Maybe some regulation, maybe some voicing, maybe the inevitable miscellaneous repairs.  But keep up with the maintenance.  It won't cost you much if you keep up with it.

Consider, after tuning, getting the soundboard fixed.  Not all tuners know how to fix an old soundboard without going through all kinds of craziness, so you might have to hunt around, but that would have great benefit for the piano.

Clean and lemon-oil the case, use a scratch cover for the dings, I'm sure you could do this yourself over a weekend.  Dust off the plate and strings, use a vacuum if needed, wipe the damper heads (in the direction of the strings).  Ask the tuner to run a cloth over the soundboard, under the strings.  We have little gizmos for doing that.  A clean piano will make you feel better.

If you do want to hire me a year or so from now, the reconditioning offer is still open.  I could take care of all those little things that need attention (like the soundboard, and tapping all the tuning pins in, and seating the strings on the bridge correctly, and correcting the voicing and the regulation, and leveling the keys and tidying up the keytops, cleaning up the dampers, etc.) Of course, if you find the guy up there willing to do all these things (and do them correctly), then you'll be all set.

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!

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.

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.

The Piano Tuner's Song

The Piano Tuner's Song is what my teacher at The New England Conservatory, Frank Hanson, used to call the sound of tuning the temperament.  Going around the circle of fifths, checking thirds and sixths, makes for an odd but intriguing ditty.

Years ago I went to a customer's house and settled in to tune their console.  A young boy, five or six years old, was quite excited to have me there, and he seated himself on the braided rug behind me and listened attentively.  It's not unusual, of course, for children to be curious about what's inside a piano, and I usually let them hit the keys to see the whippens and hammers move.  They soon run off to play, and I resume.  This boy, however, did not approach the piano to look; he stayed quietly seated as I tuned, and for much longer than I expected.

In time, though, he did rise and walk into the kitchen.  "Mom," he cried with exasperation, "I don't know what song he's playing!"  It seems, I discovered later, that he thought a piano tuner was someone who came to your house to play tunes for you on the piano.

Emergency!

A friend teased me once about the announcement on my answering machine.  The announcement asks callers to let me know if they are calling about a "piano emergency," so that I will know to call back ASAP.  My friend thought "piano emergency" was hilariously over-dramatic.

Most "piano emergencies" come about because of a scheduled performance - something goes wrong, or somebody drops the ball on calling the tuner.  This was the case with my caller on Friday afternoon.  There was a concert scheduled for Sunday afternoon.  They were going to use a keyboard, but at the last minute discovered that one of the singers will not perform with a keyboard, she will only sing with a real piano.  So they rounded up a piano from someone's home, and then realized it needed tuning.

I hesitated to commit - I had already committed to a musical gathering that night in Connecticut, and I knew I wouldn't get home until 2 AM.  On Saturday I was to perform with my band, again in Connecticut (90 minutes away), and I had to be there early for soundcheck and a bit of rehearsal.  It would be another 2 AM bedtime, and my caller's gig was for early Sunday afternoon.

But I knew about the concert, knew some of the people involved, knew it could make good connections for me, it was nearby, I needed the money, so I said yes, and shoe-horned it into my schedule.

Late Saturday morning, she called to cancel.  She explained, with apologies, that someone else had also been calling tuners for the show, and now they were double-booked.  I was off the hook.  That was fine by me, but I wonder why I got booted, and not the other guy.  Maybe because the person who called me was a woman, and the person who made the other appointment was a man.  Of course his appointment would stay, she would have to cancel hers, it would go without saying.

But at least we were all civil and pleasant and agreeable, that's the least we can hope for, and the goodwill will pay off one way or another.