I did some tuning in Crawford Bay and Grey Creek yesterday. Beautiful sunny spring drive with the snow capped mountains across the lake. I spent a few hours fixing up an old Heintzman at the Timbuktu farm and visited their donkeys. The piano had previously lived in a garage, but was in surprisingly good shape considering.
I spent the better part of a week doing a thorough cleaning, re-shaping, adjusting and regulating of Kristi Lind’s Yamaha grand. After years of practicing, teaching and recitals the piano had turned into an instrument that was a real workout to play and very difficult to control. My goal was to breath new life into the piano. A few simple things like reshaping the hammers, regulation and a good cleaning transformed the tone and created an action that was smooth and agile under the fingers.
For the most part my job is to visit a home or a venue and tune the piano for about an hour. But bringing pianos, or just the action into the shop and working on the instrument more in depth and is what I really love doing. There are so many different elements to these crazy wooden machines and it is satisfying to get the whole thing working in harmony with its self.
step 1: disassemble piano in the living room, enjoy the view
step 2: piano action in the van (it is easily removed and very portable)
step 3: shop work (hammers and wippens have been removed from the keybed)
I recently got back from my annual Toronto tour where I tuned for a lot of my musician friends. Spring had arrived a month early, I borrowed a bike and rode around the town visiting all sorts of interesting pianos and people. Here are a few.
This is Mark Segger in his Queen Street store front studio. A talented drummer and composer, Segger has just released The Beginning with his sextet.
I tuned this little guy in the home of Janet Morassutti (pictured here describing a mouse trap) and musician / author Dave Bidini. Janet plays guitar with The Billie Hollies and Dave has a new album out called In the Rock Hall.
This 77 key pianette is in the home of Julia Hambleton and Dave French, who are both very active and prolific musicians involved in too many bands and projects to list. Most notably Julia is in The Billie Hollies and The Woodshed Orchestra (great video in that link!) and Dave performs in Broken Social Scene and writes for his own quartet which released the fantastic album Dance of the Bees last year.
I started experimenting with some altered tuning for a potential music project / sound installation at the Shatford Centre. I am de-tuning an old upright piano approximately a 5th lower than your average piano which creates a very different timbre, closer to a steel drum than a piano. Just down the hall from my shop space there is a terrific stairwell which has wild reverb going on. I found the resonant frequency of the stairwell (201.37 Hz) and am tuning the piano to a just intonation scale based on that frequency. Once I have stabilized the tuning of the piano I will roll it into the stairwell and see what it sounds like. I am imagining a multitude of harmonics being activated, but who knows if it will work. I will keep you posted.
The Stairwell
The Bass Piano
Right after the holidays Deb McCann and Matt Arnott organized what many believe to be the first social gathering of the Piano Technicians from the Okanagan Valley. We had piano nerds from Kaleden to Kamloops to Revelstoke. These piano tuning parties always end up being a crazy collection of characters. One couple lives up in the woods beyond Vernon who not only do full piano rebuilds, but one of them is a luthier (guitar maker), they make sound boards from scratch (very rare) and harvest their own wood! Another fellow is a mildly autistic teenager who is currently apprenticing as a piano technician, is an antique piano and organ collector (he has more than 20) and is a self taught rock and blues piano player. We were treated with a little concert. But the winner is the grandfather of Okanagan piano tuning, Steve McCann who is in his 80’s, has two hearing aids and is still going strong in the tuning business!
I am currently doing some internal reconstructive surgery to the legs and pedal lyre of Justin Glibbery’s piano since the original mortise and tenon joints had separated. Normally this sort of job would be done by moving the piano to a shop, but in order to avoid that, I built some very sturdy supports. The Glibbery family is practicing on the piano jacked up like a trailer while the legs are being repaired.
I did a major overhaul of the Pen High 7 foot grand recently. Those teenagers really put that instrument through a lot. I spend about a week repairing bent hinges, broken prop-sticks, sheared off screws, cracked benches… you name it.
My friend Dan took some pictures of me at work on a piano last weekend. Dan is a talented guy and he takes some stunning photographs. He recently moved to the Kootenays from Montreal and came to visit Naramata for the weekend. Check out more of Dan’s work here www.danielseguin.ca.
Here are a few of the action shots and I used one as my new profile picture. Thanks Dan!
Joseph Sokoloff is a master cabinet maker. His craftsmanship is stunning. His designs are straight out of Sunset Magazine from the 70’s (of which I am a collector).
Joseph told me that Communism had destroyed the trades in the Czech Republic so he and his family fled to Canada. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, he build his entire house (right down to the wooden doorknobs) and all the Scandinavian style teak furniture inside it.
I tuned his old Mason & Risch, which he had entirely re-veneered flawlessly. His love for true craftsmanship and distain for the modern world inspired me.
I did a couple of tunings in Hedley on Thanksgiving weekend for some really interesting people. I was given gifts of dried tomatoes, grapes and fresh greens. I saw a great junk shop and an art installation comprised of neon painted sculptures made out of cylindrical car parts in a dark room illuminated only with black light. It was very surreal. I was shown a hieroglyph of the “sun god space alien.” I watched parasailers coming in for a landing. Near the end of the day I raised the pitch on Peter’s piano. His place was full of rare motorcycles and homemade coal fired steam engines. He had an amazing shop and built small ridable steam locomotives!
