I had a sobering experience yesterday. Spent four hours doing "maintenance prep" on a Yamaha C3 in a church where there is a regular concert series (6 - 8 a year). I had spent two days on it five years ago, so I did what seemed most appropriate: filed hammers, brushed knuckles, tweaked regulation (moved all the jacks about 1/2 turn from under the knuckles - i.e. a little less than 1 mm), things like that. Got done, closed up, the contact guy I was working with asked how it was.
And then he mentioned "We had been noticing a couple things." In particular, there was one pianist, one performance, where he raised the damper pedal very slowly, and a couple notes stuck out. Sure enough, the bottom two tenor dampers lifted oh so slightly ahead of the rest, and they would do that. So I opened it up and did the necessary.
But suppose he hadn't happened to mention that? I had looked at damper lift, seemed fine, saw in my notes from last time I had addressed it, so I didn't focus attention there.
It's the little details: a jack that skips out on a hard blow, the hammer that is badly mated, the unison that goes out, and it doesn't matter how wonderful all the rest of your work might have been. A job that definitely keeps us on our toes, and we need to stay attentive and always try to look at the whole picture. Another last check: play forearms across the keyboard with pedal down (no need to smash, just a fast way to play all the notes), then raise it very slowly. I do that when I work on dampers, but this time I wasn't working on dampers, so I omitted it.
This morning, tuning in the recital hall, I did that, and found the one damper that apparently someone managed to tilt a bit when doing some kind of extended use: not obvious, but that note rang.
------------------------------
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm@unm.eduhttp://fredsturm.nethttp://www.artoftuning.com"We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same." - Carlos Casteneda
------------------------------