Condition & Performance for Piano Tuning

Video Transcript

On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Tom Flowers of Well Tempered Piano Tuning here to talk to you today about piano tuning and maintenance. Now, as we tuned this piano and gotten through it, we've taken a look at the action, gotten a general feel for its condition. At ninety-eight there are several things to consider not the least of which is how much work can this piano take. That is to say, how many times can you take the action out and work with the action parts that are ninety-eight years old. In the same way that if you were doing a 10K you probably would not bring your ninety year old grandmother. So the second thing to keep in mind in that whole equation is what the player expects out of the piano. So the first thing I would say about this particular piano if the player wanted a lot of performance out of this piano. I would then ask them if it had a lot of sentimental value because the amount of money it would take to get this piano performing well would be so far beyond it's actual market value that you would have to like this piano for another reason. So in many ways, this is a, this is not a major do over piano simply because it has too many problems. Then, you step back and say what can we do that's economically viable and that no one has to kill any relatives for. So there's actually quite a bit that can be done. First of all, just simple lubrication and cleaning will take care of some of these problems. We have some keys that need to be leveled. That's a mechanistic problem back in the Whippen that can be adjusted. When you start replacing is when you start getting into real money and we can do various things, reshape the hammers to make them sound better. We can go through and a piano like this, it's probably not been tuned in some time. It'll take a couple of tunings before it can really can be tuned well. Think of it like someone you've taken to the gym who hasn't been to the gym in ten years. It's going to have a certain amount of reaction to that. In so far as the structure of the piano as a practical piano, the pin block still works, so it's going to hold a tune. If this is a piano for lessons for a casual teenage student, it's fine. There's plenty that can be done to bring it up to snuff. If someone's thinking about studying seriously on this piano, it isn't going to happen short of a total rebuild. A total rebuild on a piano even like this including replacing the sound board and the whole shebang would begin at about fourteen thousand dollars. So that obviously isn't going to happen. So what you simply need to do is treat what is there and the structure that is there to make it the best it can be and be realistic about your expectations.

Community Members who...

• Favorited this Video
• Rated This Video

Top Tags