I tuned a Mason & Hamlin A grand last Thursday for a longtime customer who is an excellent pianist. There was a call on the answering machine Friday that something was wrong with the tuning. I went this morning (Monday) and found he wasn't kidding. Four notes in the middle were painfully out. On two of them, one string was fine, one string was grossly flat, and one string was grossly sharp. One other had the center string grossly flat and the other two OK. The fourth had one severely sharp string, two others flat. The piano is less than 20 years old and well-maintained. The house is humidified now and air-conditioned in the summer. The plate, bridges, soundboard, and pinblock all seem fine. I did not test the pins with a torque wrench, but they felt good and normally tight. The piano tuned up well. As with most M&H's this section of the piano has one string of each unison strung singly with a loop around the hitch pin, but I could find no correlation between that and the way the strings detuned, meaning, I don't think things slipped around the hitch pins. The detuning was so bad it could not have been mere carelessness on my part. The man played it the day I tuned it and it was fine. His grandchildren and his son were there at different times Thursday and Friday. His son (grown) is also a good pianist, and told his father it was out of tune, and lo and behold. The grandkids played it, but didn't abuse it, and I don't see how this could have happened even if kids did bang on it. Frankly, if evidence supported it, I would say someone deliberately detuned four notes. After all, some strings were severely sharp, more than 50 cents. But there is no tuning lever in the house, nor does the son have one. The customer said he assumed I had put new strings on and had not told him. But he said he ruled that out, because I hadn't charged him for the work, and (gentle dig at me) he knew that was out of the question. What on earth is going on? I will, of course, monitor the piano, and if it happens again I know the man will contact me right away. But all I can come up with is A) a very strange burglar B) magnetic anomalies in the earth's crust or core C) alien intervention or D) supernatural interference in my life, either simply to annoy me, or to make me realize that I really have no control over the universe. I find none of these satisfying, and some of them irritating. The customer seems quite sane and normal, but I've watched enough Hitchcock movies to know that you can never REALLY TELL. Help me. My own sanity is at stake here. Mark Graham Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory of Music
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