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Piano tuning at Music and Arts in Peabody

It is a bit of a gamble when a music store calls you for a tuning. Sometimes the pianos are good, sometimes not. I was pleasantly surprised when I tuned these two Ritmuller upright pianos at the Music and Arts store in Peabody Ma.

Another marketing idea that didn’t help this low end piano . . .

Oh the art of marketing. This vintage of Aeolian (1970’s) has to be the lowest quality pianos ever made. To compensate for that they come up with some pretty funny ways of making them seem a lot better quality then they are. “especially engineered strip of sound carrying Maple”? Good stuff.

Installing a brand new amp in a Wurlitzer 200 electric piano

The wurli now has a very nice hot output with a very low noise floor. Great amps.

Hours and hours working on this Hohner Clavinet

This is the underside of a clavinet. Over time the little orange tips (which sort of fret the strings) turn into a gooey, gum like texture. A pain to scoop out and put new ones in. You need patience and some inventive ways of digging out these little buggers!

Every now and again I stand back and look at the amount of work I have ahead of me. Today I did just that. Looks like Ill be here a while. May need a bigger shop.

Thats one rusty piano!

Rust rust and more rust! Please be careful when choosing a “free craigslist piano”. You get what you pay for folks. Hard to tell customers bad news and this piano was in horrible shape.

Be careful folks . . .

I feel really bad that these very nice customers have no idea that the “rebuilt piano” is without a doubt the worst job I have ever seen. It looks like an 8 year old did this work.I can not stress enough – have a piano tech evaluate the piano before buying it!

Hohner Pianet repair

This customers pianet suffered from a bad case of rust. The pitch was 40-50 cents flat on each reed. I had to scrape off a ton of rust and file the brass weight to get it back in shape. It took me a solid week but I got it and the customer was happy with …

A fun last minute tuning at MIT radio station WMBR

Got this last minute tuning for MIT’s radio station. For a 100 yo piano it plays and sounds pretty good. They use this for live performances. They don’t make them like this anymore!

Another example of a low end piano pretending not to be . . .

“Mezzo-Thermoneal Stabilzer” ha? I wonder if the salesman used this as a pitch back in the day?