Some jobs are doomed from the start.
I showed up at the customer’s house, it was the last tuning for the day and I was ready to go home. I’m invited into the dining room, see a large, black, shiny grand and think I’m in the clear. It’s clearly fairly new, it’s not too small (the smaller the piano, the more difficult it is to tune (generally speaking, obviously there are a million other factors which affect it)), it should be an easy one.
Then things started to go downhill. “There are some sticking keys, I don’t suppose you could have a look could you?” Well that’s not a problem. With a new piano like this there were probably just some problems with environmental changes between the factory and the customer’s house and a bushing has swollen somewhere. Fine. So I have a look, and sure enough, some notes are having trouble returning. I was having some trouble seeing inside the piano, so I quickly pulled the action out and onto the table and it became fairly obvious that the hammers were catching on each other on a few notes. Not a problem, I just needed to space them slightly and everything was fine.
I threw everything back into the piano and started to tune. Then I got to the hammers I’d spaced and things started to go wrong. The notes I’d spaced were playing two notes. Some strings from the notes they should be hitting and some from the next notes up. So here I am, thinking about how much of an idiot I was and how I should have spaced the hammers in situ, so I get my grand butt spacer (don’t laugh, that really is what it’s called) back out and start tweaking again. And here I hit a snag. The hammers don’t fit in the space. It was a cheap Chinese thing and clearly the designers hadn’t really cared that much and, as long as it looked and kind of played like a piano, that was good enough. The strings were so close together that either the hammers didn’t play all the strings, the hammers played some of the next strings over, or the hammers rubbed together and wouldn’t fall back into place.
Well, I eventually got something working that, although wasn’t right, at least sort of worked. Fortunately the customer was very understanding, she knew she hadn’t bought the best piano in the world and was happy to accept the consequences of it.
But let this be a lesson to you. If you’re going to fork out huge amounts of money on a new grand piano, stop. Think again. Then fork out a bit more.
(If I’m going to start making statements like that I really should start selling pianos, shouldn’t I.)