Days 92 and 93 – Sunday, September 4 and Monday, September 5 – Good progress

Goals: Work on it

Music: Doing some tuning, so none.

I did a second coat of acrylic on the mother-of-pearl inlay because the first coat did not come out very even. The second coat didn’t either, because it is basically impossible to get the acrylic even across the board, because it is so long and narrow and because it drips over the edge. I got it pretty close to what it needs to be, and I’m leaving it at that.

Then I got to work on the strings. I had to re-shim about 25 pins, but that’s all I did. I did not mess with bigger pins and whatnot. If a pin was loose, I shimmed it, re-strung the existing string and cleaned it up as best I could, then tuned it. Two days of that, and the strings are completely tunable, and, as of this moment, in tune. That’s as far as I’m going with that.

Next is to get the keys working. I’m very close to settling for a majority of the keys working, as opposed to a fully working piano, so if some keys are stubborn and do not work, there is some chance I may talk myself out of working on them and simply leave them dead in their tracks. I really just want to get the piano looking nice and trade it to somebody for a sweet black lacquered baby grand. There is still an outside chance I will end up with a bar or a desk, if I meet any severe adversity before the end of the project.

Inching closer to completion, and I must say, it feels good – again.

Day 91 – Saturday, Sept. 3 – Because I just can’t put it off any longer

Goals: Get the artistic stuff on the accent piece finished

Music: Charlie Parker’s “Complete Jazz at Massey Hall” and Complete Verve Master Takes, Discs 1 and 2.

There’s just no getting around it. Whether Mrs. S. cares if we ever get the dining room back or not, I for one am definitely sick of having this piano project hanging over me. I decided not to make excuses and to just get back to work.

Since I didn’t want to tangle with the strings, which is off-putting in general and particularly hard work in specific, I decided to exhilarate my artistic side and work on the mother-of-pearl inlay on the fascia board. I touched up the gold paint, having already done the black paint before the project went into hibernation, and I drew in some leaves and flowers to make it look nice. I poured a layer of clear acrylic over it, and that made a bit of a mess. I shook most of it off and left it to dry.

This morning I checked the board and the acrylic didn’t turn out bad, but it isn’t great either (pretty much like everything on the piano). So, I will try to put a few more touches on the board and then one more coat of acrylic and then we’ll see about the strings.

It’s supposed to rain today, which means I won’t be able to smoke the ribs I prepped, which means I won’t have to spend a ton of time cooking, running back and forth to the grill, etc. So I’ll be cooking in the oven and have plenty of time to work on the piano. Hopefully, I’ll make some genuine progress today.

Top ten reasons why finishing my piano is taking so long

10) It won't cooperate. Let's face it: even inanimate objects can be a bitch sometimes. This thing goes out of tune if I look at it cross-eyed. It's discouraging.
9) Runner's knee. Had it for four weeks. Doctor says I'm not a five-foot-five, 110-pound Ethiopian and that I need to run in shoes instead of barefoot or flats. Seriously, though, the single most painful activity with runner's knee is standing - the required posture for tuning a square grand.
8) I can't see the end so I'm reluctant to work toward it. I don't know what else to say about that.

I guess there are only three reasons.

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.

Studying Up

It’s hard – no, make that impossible – to work on much of anything whenever you get called in to work on the weekend. This happened to me two Sundays ago and last Saturday, so progress on my piano has more or less ground to a halt. Because of my ruined Saturday, Sunday was overly hectic, but I did find time to leaf through and read my piano repair manual and try to figure out what to do with the wippens that are killing about fifteen of the keys in my piano (if in fact it is the wippens – there may be some fit issues with the hammers as well). In short, at this critical and hyper-detailed juncture, I’m not finding much help for my square grand in a manual that focuses almost exclusively on grands and uprights, not to mention the frequent detailed passages about Steinways. I was able to glean a few ideas from the book, but I’m still not really sure what is going to be the best way to repair the keys that keep dying. I expect it will require some experimenting.

So, this coming weekend, I think I’m going to move to some cosmetic work. Probably work on the mother-of-pearl inlay some and maybe even go back to the stool again (I’ve got the brushes for it).

I need to be pushing a little harder on this.

A Night with a True Jazz Legend

Wednesday June 1 found me and Mrs. S once again in Birmingham AL, to attend a jazz concert at the Alys Stephens Center for the Arts. We sure spend a lot of time there for it being over a one and a half hour drive from our house. But when a guy like Herbie Hancock is performing in your neck of the woods, 90 minutes seems a pretty reasonable drive. As part-time patrons with dedicated front row seats, it’s hard to pass on an opportunity like this, so naturally, we also signed up for the VIP “Meet & Greet” package for our chance to meet the legend and possibly have a few photos taken and get a few CD’s signed. Imagine our surprise then when one of the event coordinators told us that his contract did not allow for either. (Turns out he did both.)

So come time for the concert and it’s mostly empty seats, but they filled up pretty quickly and the show started maybe only ten minutes late. Herbie’s drummer comes out and he starts right into a funky syncopated riff that I couldn’t see how he could keep going but that he did and never missed on. The bass player wandered on stage and it took him about thirty seconds to get to his five string axe, attach the strap, and get it settled before laying a line down on top of the drums. So, they’re on the right hand side of the stage, wailing, and I’m all caught up in the beat when out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of glittering orange, and there’s this tiny old guy moon walking toward the keyboard pit. (Yes, moon walking!)

And the crowd goes wild!

And those turned out to be the two main themes of the night: a little old dude who should be laid out on a recliner or playing bingo somewhere, funkin’ it up on a piano, computerized synth, and a keytar, and a bunch of people screaming at him as he does so. Which is also what got me: Here’s a guy who released an album in every one of the last six decades, has more than fifty albums of material to choose from, is over seventy years old, can do anything he wants musically and professionally, and if he was taking it easy and swinging through a quiet version of “Watermelon Man” or letting some singer take the lead on one of his compositions while he sleepwalks (instead of moon walks) through the comps and a canned solo, everyone would still be appreciative and crazy, but instead, he’s out there with a freaking keytar, jumping around like a four-year old with a squirt gun on the first day of summer as he bangs away on “Actual Proof” or “Chameleon”. What’s going on?

I’ll tell you what: Herbie Hancock is going on. And on, and on, and on. No wonder his latest album involves musicians of eleven different nationalities singing in seven different countries recorded in four different studios. When you’ve done as much music as Herbie, that’s the only way you can get to something new and fresh. Stunning.

Honestly, the concert made me dizzy and I don’t think it was from the drive and the stifling 95-degree heat. Herbie did mostly new stuff from his Imagine Project recording, which I have a hard time classifying as jazz but which I enjoy immensely. I was especially psyched when he and his two man band and one woman singer did my favorite track from the work, Tamatant Tilay/Exodus. Everything else he played, he played as funky as possible, spending probably 40% of his stage time on his Roland keytar. His piano, a Fazioli concert grand, didn’t sound real. His playing sounded fresh, whimsical, and inspirational. Somehow. The supporting band members were solid musically and just, everything was great. Words escape me.

Our signed copy of "The Imagine Project"

The meet and greet session started  frightfully stiff. Only one guy seemed truly comfortable talking with Herbie, and they started talking about, like, Herbie’s third album, released the year after I was born. It was sort of electric just hearing Herbie say the name, "Miles Davis".  Anyway, to get things moving,  the coordinator jumped in and made everyone get their pictures out of the way so Herbie wouldn’t spend the whole night standing around with our lot. When I went up to meet him, I had him sign our copy of his latest, The Imagine Project, and we took two photos before Mrs. S joined in. Then he spent the rest of the time chatting her up. Later, when Herbie was done with the photos, he wandered over to the fruit tray, where Mrs. S and I were, so we talked a little bit more and Mrs. S had him sign our copy of “Maiden Voyage”. (I like his signature. He writes so you can actually read his name. See above and below.) I literally had a whole stack to be signed, but we were being reserved since we were told right out of the gate that he wouldn’t be doing that.

Our signed copy of "Maiden Voyage"

After he’d had a few pieces of fruit, he looked around for something to say and do, but the coordinators gave him the go ahead, so he waved, and was gone. He’s a very nice, personable, agreeable gentleman. He’s small, but his hands are firm and supple. His smile is bright and his eyes even brighter. He doesn’t move fast and his hair is thinning, but he’s genuine, real, meticulous, and true to his songs when it comes to his music. I think top to bottom, meeting Herbie Hancock was one of the most satisfying and valuable experiences I’ve had in my short four year jazz career. I may have been late to jazz, but I’m catching up fast.

Days 88 and 89 – Saturday and Sunday, May 28 and 29 – Looks like a piano!

Goals: Finish with the leather on the hammers and install the keys

Music: Shelley Manne and His Men’s “Complete Live at the Blackhawk” (all four discs).

With the keys inserted back in the piano, it again looks like a piano and the temptation to chop it into a desk or a bar is reduced. As has been the case throughout this project, however, the piano continues to beset me with “good news, bad news” scenarios:

-Good news: I successfully manufactured a replacement hammer from scrap hammers purchased online. Bad news: I wasn’t actually missing a hammer. The space on the hammer assembly is for something else. (Wish I knew what.) At least that explained why I ended up one piece of leather short when I was adding leather to the hammers.

-Good news: I successfully rebuilt the pivot arm end of a broken hammer. Bad news: The difference in shape and size is just enough that the wippen didn’t pick it up and project the hammer correctly. Hard to believe when you look at the photo – we’re talking a fraction of a millimeter difference! (I ended up shimming the whole assembly to make it work; it still joined the ranks of dead keys after the first go around.)

Top is the replacement, bottom is an original. Yeah, they're different, but...

-Good news: I finished putting the leather on all the hammers. Bad news: Even with careful and thorough trimming, the tiny size differential makes many of the keys stick, both against each other and against parts of the piano when the keys are reinserted.

Hammers all covered in leather and ready to go.

The pile of leather chunks that took be two days to trim from the heads - and they still don't work right.

-Good news: I was able to insert the keys and a number of them actually hit on the strings they were supposed to and made a passable sound. Bad news: After playing once through the keyboard, any number of keys went dead, or took some jiggling to get playing again, or didn’t sound at all in the first place.

-Good news: The rough tuning of the piano means I have actually gotten a reasonable facsimile of harmonic sound from the strings. Bad news: Not realizing that some of the “single” bass strings were actually “double” bass strings, I’ve got the piano tuned to play more notes than there are keys.

Good news: At the lower end of the keyboard, all the keys work. Bad news: The ones that are supposed to be hitting double strings are only hitting one string. (Maybe it doesn’t matter if I tune them or not.

Memorial Day will be filled with tuning work and key adjustment. I’m even going to have to get my piano repair manual out and see what my options are with the wippens that aren’t triggering the keys right after I just fixed them. (I mean, of course I made sure all the keys were working before I reinserted them, but I didn’t think so many would go dead right out of the gate!)

One more: Good news: The soft pedal actually moves the damper assembly into position and deadens the hammer strike on the strings. Bad news: It doesn’t go back on its own. More adjustment!