Never Judge a Book (or Piano) by it's Cover

I recently revisited a client of mine who’s piano I hadn’t tuned in over a year. I remember the first time I saw this piano, an old Kurtzman upright. I thought the same thing that I think every time I see these old upright pianos. “Oh boy”. Typically these kinds of pianos are a mess, they all tend to have been made between 1900 and 1940 and are generally not in good shape at all. Broken hammers, broken keys, broken action parts, broken strings. Basically broken everything. And forget about Tuning, they are so full of false beats and inharmonicity that they can be really challenging to make sound good, and that’s if the pins have any kind of torque so you can actually set them to be stable.

So when I walked in and saw this piano, all of these thoughts are racing through my head. I had already started preparing my customer for the amount of work it would take, what I thought I was going to find and most importantly how much it may cost them. Then I played a few chords. The piano was out of tune, for sure, but the tone wasn’t half bad, much better than I expected. Then I check the pitch, thinking that it would be at least a half step off. Pretty much right on 440hz. “Ok, not bad” I thought. “Time to see what’s inside this thing” I removed the cover, to find someone had put all new hammers on it, which explains the nice tone. I also notice some new action parts and that the pins had some signs of glue to help them stabilize. This is somewhat surprising to me since it’s common for someone to not want to invest a lot of money into a piano of this vintage. You are generally going to spend more on these kinds of repairs than the piano is worth. But here it was, and I was ready to start tuning it to see if the piano I thought it was would reveal itself. The tuning began and it was surprisingly easy, as I got into it things were moving along very well. Once I got into the high treble some of the age started showing itself, lots of false beats, hard to get the notes sounding clean. I persevered through it and when I was done I was actually shocked with how good this piano sounded. I sat down to play Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” and I couldn’t believe this was the same instrument that I written off before.

Now that I have visited this instrument a few more times I now know exactly what to expect. Really nice tone, great feel, some problems tuning the treble, but overall a very nice instrument considering what you would expect your getting. Hat’s off to whomever the technician was who put the effort into rehabbing this. Even these minor improvements breathed new life into this instrument. My customer is thrilled with it, I am pleased with the end result and Round Midnight has never sounded better.