Startlingly Stable Steinway

Alan R. Barnard tune4u at earthlink.net
Sun Jul 30 15:33:52 MDT 2006


You'll think I'm making this up or exagerating but I'm not ...

1906 AIII, had serious issues when I first saw it. Most serious, pin block very weak. She'd had it restrung and they never even suggested a new block. Then, when they inserted the new pins, they left some of them very high. Terrible job.

Anyway, piano wouldn't hold tune for anything. older customer, not willing to rebuild ----Ooooooh what a candidate! So I applied CA, tapped in the high pins, and installed a Dampp-chaser just for good measure (closed up some see-thru soundboard cracks). That was about two years ago.

We were tuning every six months but she put me off last time saying it "still sounded good".  Well, you know how that goes. At the one year mark I arrived to tune the piano, she said it still sounded good but a note was sticking. Okay.

Sat down and noodled a few notes. It DID sound good. Got out the gear and started to tune. A4 center string was dead-on A440 and I mean dead on, exactly at A440!

Tuned the piano and had multiple freebies, including some don't-touch'em unisons. There was not a single string more than 3 or 4 cents out and darned few that were that "bad". And I'm very fussy about on-pitch notes and dead-on unisons.

The only real aggravation left is that this piano plays like a Mack truck. Very heavy and way out of regulation. She likes it that way, what can you say. And BTW, she was a concert pianist and can still --heavy action and all--bring Beethoven and Brahms out of that piano that'll give you goose bumps.

It's an interesting life.

Alan Barnard
Salem, MO
Joshua 24:15
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