piano repair

Not sure if it's the effects from living through our construction project (inside a big protective box in the living room) or if it's just regular wear and tear (my piano tech's opinion), but my piano developed a number of issues lately. The strangest was that, with the soft pedal depressed, several keys on the keyboard were producing two notes when played instead of the standard one. However, I also had a sticky key, another key with particularly noisy action, a few notes that had a slightly metallic sound when struck, and two squeaky pedals.

So I saw and learned about parts of my piano yesterday that I had never seen before. This scene with the "guts" pulled out of the piano is one that I actually have seen once before, but it was the most dramatic shot and one I thought some of y'all might enjoy. What was new to me was the inside of the pedal mechanisms, which it took Felix about 15 straight minutes of removing screws in order to access. In the end, that fixed one of the pedal issues, but not the other. It took another half hour of troubleshooting to figure out that the squeak we were hearing was actually coming from the keyboard when the soft pedal was depressed. He did a slick test with a dollar bill to make sure the height of the keyboard mechanism was correct (it wasn't), turned a few pins to raise it at one end, and the squeak miraculously went away.

I'm relieved to have the piano in good working condition again, as there's a musical event happening at my house this weekend, and I want everything to sound great for my guests. More on that next week!