Piano Maintenance

Virtually every concert tuner used until the advent of electronic tuning devices--"old school." A good solid, stable, musical tuning will maximize the beauty of the piano, and can radically change the player's perception of the piano's touch and tone. My gift for tuning from early on in my career opened many doors for me, and has been a big source of pleasure to me throughout my career. I get a big charge, still, from throwing a great tuning on a great piano; an even greater thrill is hearing my work recorded; I'm fascinated by how good it sounds and frustrated that it's not perfect--I'm my own harshest critic. If you want to know more about my tuning system, click here. For a dialogue between me and a top-level technician based on the contents of the tuning article click here.

 --Action regulation is dealing with the mechanism--the keys, keyframe and parts stack, collectively called the action, along with and aided by the damper/pedal system--that transfers energy from the player's fingers to the point where the hammer strikes the strings. There are many points in each individual key mechanism (all 88) that can be adjusted and by so doing, bring each key mechanism into the parameters and specifications that the manufacturer intended. Because a piano action is mostly comprised of parts made of wood, leather, and felt, these materials can wear, shrink or swell easily, and need to be attended to. A piano is a very forgiving machine--it can function, play notes and repeat, even if it's almost mortally compromised--but it's so much more fulfilling and inspiring to play an instrument that's been well-regulated and is functioning at nearly 100% capacity. It's usually not because of your fingers, or advancing age, or anything to do with you that the piano seems harder, or spongier, or not as much fun to play as it used to be: it's usually simply a lack of mechanical regulation, which is easy to fix.

Piano Repair

 --Tone building, including voicing  
This is the Dark Continent, or the "final frontier," of piano technology very few piano technicians venture deep into the world of building tone in a piano hammer. People usually think of voicing as sticking needles

 

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David Andersen Pianos > Piano Maintenance