The piano tuning wrenches arrived. As promised I checked out the first customer for the things - myself. Is he really good or totally crazy? Or both? I'm guessing it'll be about 5-6 weeks minimum before it starts sounding right again; based on my prior experiences with pianos and some recent work tuning autoharps. There are just over 200 tuning pegs and you have to tune it over and over again, waiting a few days each time to let everything settle. So I'm not all that good. What were the other choices again?

Of course this also points out the flaw with hiring a piano tuner. If you only pay for one visit you're just throwing money away. Three visits minimum. If it holds its tune after the second you're done, but that'll almost never be the case. All the autoharps I've worked on have taken about five tuning cycles before they started to hold.

The pianoforte design comes from an age of craftsmen. Over-engineered to the point of absurdity. The high notes are tripled (three individual strings per note). Below middle C it drops to two and then finally one for only an octave. Each hammer assembly is completely different than the one next to it. They can't be interchanged. My guess is you could probably build an original piano (single notes struck by identical straight hammers) for a few hundred a piece in quantity - providing a mass market piano for well under a thousand bucks. The Asian assembly lines would be cranking these out by the millions except for the electronics revolution - which changed everything. You don't even need hammers or strings. A 2 dollar chip and a battery and about 3 bucks for the microswitches by the yard with some chincy looking plastic keys.

It's an old family joke - much too long and involved to try and explain. But we call it the packrat gene. Most of the time it's a liability, but it's a blessing in disguise running a retail business. The store is just swallowing up all these crates of stuff. I'm amazed just looking at the cardboard going through the place how much I've stuffed into the place and still have a little room to walk. I note that mom's good at this too. Tee hee...

Then Murphy struck. Completely lost my sense of pitch while trying to get the low piano notes in sync. Can't tell an A sharp from a B flat. Oh wait... OK how about an F# from a B flat seventh minor suspended eighth? It's low A fercrysakes. 110 cycles a second. That's just far enough off of the power line major harmonic to wig you out completely. I'll come back to that one later. I've got a few C's and a few A's tuned up. That's enough that I can at least do the rest of the initial tuning by ear. Not today though.