Piano Trebuchet at Burning Man

Thanks to Ron Berry for posting this on the PTG Blog.

A Midlife Obsession with the Piano

MEMOIR

Keys to Happiness ... Ode to Joy

An amateur musician tries to recover the sound of her beloved piano.

SLIDESHOW

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Reviewed by Eugenia Zukerman

Sunday, January 20, 2008; Page BW04

GRAND OBSESSION

A Piano Odyssey

By Perri Knize

Scribner. 371 pp. $27.50

"A soul seems to reside in the belly of this piano, and it reaches out to touch mine, igniting a spark of desire within me that quickly catches fire," writes amateur pianist Perri Knize in Grand Obsession.


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Missing Kimball

I got a call from Jim Geiger, a technician in Kentucky. He told me about a woman named Jean Peterson who moved from Sacramento to Oregon. Somehow a Kimball vertical got left behind and no one knows where it is.
It has a cherry finish and is serial number 11309.
If you find this piano please contact Jim Geiger at 606-683-3059.

Kirsi Lassi explains how to tune a birdcage

I met Ms. Lassi on Facebook. She is not just a tuner in Finland — she is president of the Pianotechnician's Association. She mentioned that she sees a lot of birdcage pianos and I asked her to explain how she mutes them during tuning.

Oh yes... the "birdcage" pianos are a bit challenging :) Some of them are just old and not so good, but I've noticed that Julius Bluthner over-damper pianos are actually very good quality. They seem to have made them still, when others had already started the normal action style. I have a few of them at my regular customers, and they are really quite nice to tune. Of course the dampers don't work as well as in normal action, but the sound and quality are pretty nice. I usually put the felt strip between the strings above the damper system, as far as it goes - maybe just one and a half octaves in the middle (and the whole bass part, too). After that I use the long nylon wedge I use for the treble in normal uprights, sticking it in between the damper wires and hammer shanks. It is a bit slow, but doable. After doing it for a while, you sort of get the hang of it, and can move the wedge to the next one just listening to the noise it makes when you scrape it against the strings, knowing where you are with it :) But, usually it takes a bit bending down and trying to see where the strings are, and with the felt strip, looking from the top to see which strings the hammer is hitting, so it's a bit tiring for the back. You should try it one day, especially if you meet a good quality "birdcage" piano. The customer would be so happy to finally get it in tune :) And especially if you happen to see a Bluthner over-damper piano - those are really very nice to work with, compared to all other "birdcage" pianos I've ever met.

New use for a pegboard

A piece of pegboard (with a couple of pieces of wood glued underneath to raise it off the tabletop) is a great way to store screws when you're taking apart an action.

Technology Review: Gibson's Self-Tuning Guitar

It's every guitar player's nightmare: you step onstage, strike your rock-god pose, triumphantly strum the first chord of a song--and discover that your guitar is out of tune.

A new line of instruments from Gibson Guitar now promises to banish this scenario to the dark ages with high-tech self-tuning technology built into the company's flagship electric-guitar models.

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