Sunday, July 3, 2011

Day 90 –Sunday, June 26 – Rain outside, gloom inside

Goals: Work on it

Music: Doing some tuning, so none.

A bad case of runners knee and cloudy skies and the threat (and actual falling) of rain more or less forced me to work on the piano. A while back when I inserted the keys, I realized that I had some double strings that I had tuned as if they were singles, meaning that my piano was severely under-tuned in the lower register. I set about correcting that. So, to be sure I had everything correct, I started at middle A, which, diligent readers will remember, I tuned to G# to lower the stress on the piano. Unfortunately, I seemed to have miscounted, probably because of the double strings I counted as singles, and what should have been G# was actually at F. Cripes!

So, starting at middle A, I moved everything up so that all the keys would be a half tone flat. That meant tightening everything. That meant finding some pins that couldn’t hold tune because of the increased stress. I wanted to get at least half the keyboard done, but standing up in that awkward posture made my knee start hurting too much, so I wasn’t quite able to do half the keyboard. And at that, I had four strings that were untunable. I might try for a whole tone down to see if that makes life any easier for me. Anyway, I could only work for an hour and half, but that was enough. The piano is getting closer and closer to being a decorative piece and not a musical instrument. I swear if things don’t start going right with it pretty soon, I’m turning the sucker into a bar.

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