There is an expression “Necessity is the mother of all inventions” . I think that’s how it goes. It means, If you need it, you must make it. I have been trying to learn piano, and making baby steps at my learning process. I had one a few years ago, that I put on my front porch and played occasionally. It was free from Craigslist. By the way, pianos are free all the time on Craigslist. They are heavy and always need tuning. The one I put on the porch needed lots of repairs and a tuning. I did both. It wasn’t a covered porch, so during the winter a little bit of snow would drift onto it and eventually sounded like dog poop so I dragged the piano behind the house and burned it in the fire pit. I recently picked up a Wurlitzer spinet piano free from Craigslist.
This piano is not as tall or heavy as my other one. Although I have never tuned a piano before, I gave it a try.I got it very close. Some info on a piano more than half of the 88 keys, have 3 strings each. So that’s 53 notes with 3 strings, 21 notes that have 2 strings , and 14 notes that have only one string. That is a total of 215 strings that need adjustment…Whoa….. The tool used to tune a piano is the same size used to tighten a drum head, and cost about 50-80 bucks. And I am not spending 80 bucks for a tool I will use once. A 1/4 inch square socket is the size required for the the tuning peg. A regular socket is not gonna work. Trust me, I tried. I borrowed a 1/4 inch square socket from my friend Stan and used my 1/2″ breaker bar to adjust about 200 strings. It take a very delicate adjustment to get each string in tune. A person who does this for a living can tune an entire piano under 1 hour. I took me about 3 days. I used a guitar tuning app on my iPhone for most of it. I thought by knowing how to tune a piano, I would learn a lot faster. Nope, I still suck. But at least now I have a pretty cool office desk and I can play a C chord. Next week I try ‘smoke on the water’ by Deep Purple.