Days 78 and 79 – Saturday and Sunday, February 19 and 20 – Tuning in

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano.

Music: Ornette Coleman’s “Beauty is a Rare Thing” discs 5 and 6; David Murray’s “Ming” (only for as long as I could stand).

Mrs. S. decided to go out on Saturday and she made it clear that she wanted to see some progress on the piano when she got home. So, I got busy and kept plugging away at the loose pins, badly wound strings, and other issues that are awaiting correction on my piano. The good thing is that now it is nothing more than a repetitious process of determining which strings are untunable because of loose pins, removing the pin, inserting a shim and/or a larger pin, tightening down the pin, rewinding the string and rough tuning it to make sure it will stay.

So that’s what I did, both Saturday and Sunday. I’d say about one third of all the pins require shimming, maybe even one half. I started at middle A and after two days of steady work, I’m up to the highest C on the keyboard, which leaves about seven or eight keys to go (remember: my square grand only goes up to A with its 85 keys) to have the upper half of the keyboard tuned and ready. Then I’ll be ready to do the fifteen keys leading down to the single-wound-string bass notes (33 of those) before moving to the hammers to finish up this project.

I’d be making better progress if not for two things: this re-doing the strings bit is really, really tedious. Just terribly boring, yet requiring full attention and awareness, not only to do the job right, but to keep from getting hurt as the strings are loosened and tightened over those 130 year old pin blocks. The other factor is that I reached all this avant-garde jazz crap at the same time as trying to tune the piano, which, for obvious reasons is basically impossible to do. No one can tell the difference between Bb3 above middle C and B3 with David Murray screeching some crap out of his sax. Turn off the music, work, turn on the music, work, turn off the music – that’s doesn’t get it. I worked in silence on Sunday except for the reverb from the strings and soundboard. It may be like that for a while, now.