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If you bought it used, make sure it's all working 100% before you change anything. Find somebody with a tube tester, test the tubes. Use an ESR meter to check that the caps are good.

Etc. Probably wouldn't cost much to have a good tech give it the once-over.

Something I was looking at a couple years ago was a "duct booster fan", which is a fan designed to be mounted in the middle of a round air duct. Some models have quite low noise specs, and can be used with soft flex duct to really decouple the vibration.

drumsound wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 28, 2024 8:40 am

If you're ever driving north through Illinois, stop by and hear mine.

I'd be tempted too, but I'd argue with the "north" bit. I'm not quite on the Wisconsin border, but closer to there than the Chicago Loop.

One of the more interesting areas in working on old pianos is voicing. Over time the parts can stiffen up, but there are great modern lubricants designed specifically for pianos - Protek CLP is kind of the standard, the WD-40 of the piano world. Oddly enough you don't want to go too crazy with this ...

So yeah, free pianos. Easy to find, not so easy to move. Here in the Chicago suburbs it cost $275 to have the current piano moved from one house a half hour away to my house, 2-3 steps at each end. So that's the first expense, though if you've got access to a van, a ramp, and a few friends you may w...

Earlier I mentioned the "previous" piano. The current piano is a 1967 Cable, another upright but tall enough to have a proper action, not a dropped action. The Wurlitzer had the kind of action that is dropped several inches to allow for a smaller case, and as a result has the connection to the keys ...

I still keep expecting your first post to start out with "...but I play one on TV." Ahh, so I'm not the only one. Was tempted to make some videos, but probably won't. At this point maybe it would be good if somebody did that whole ultra-long "back from the dead" type of rebuild series, and there is...

I'm a weirdo and should probably just be doing classical recording, because I like everything as clean as possible. When I got my first decent digital converter it was great, finally things just came out the same way they came in. That being said my own vocals now always go through a transformer pre...

I would add that after spending an hour plus tuning, I walk away with extremely fine pitch perception for a little while afterwards. Or so it seems, anyway.

So I've always heard about the idea of "stretch tuning," which I understand to be something along the line of, "once you make it out of the middle, ignore the tuner and train/ trust your ears, as harmonic truth and perfect equal temperament are both false trails." True? Or have I misunderstood? It'...

Just flip the snare over, and you have everything covered! Easy peasy.

Would a modern tuner with a mic help with that? I think a fair number of modern tuners would be mostly OK, though really you want something that's rather high resolution. Real professional piano tuning software goes in the the hundreds of dollars! I wish the guy behind the AP Tuner app was still pr...

I should mention that while you don't need golden ears to tune a piano, you do still need to be a bit of a weirdo to get through the whole thing. That top octave is a *very* tough neighborhood. And if you've got a professional technician coming in to tune your higher quality piano... definitely keep...

So the piano I started with was a 1973 Wurlitzer spinet. Not a great piano by any standard, and as a spinet it had the added bonus of being hard to work on. I did get it to where it sounded pretty good in the midrange (where all the money is anyway), and it stayed in tune pretty well too. But it had...

Sources - youtube, of course. Also books, I have the venerable book by Arthur Reblitz about repairing and tuning pianos, also Mario Igrec's much more recent "Pianos Inside Out". And of course old-fashioned message boards, like the Piano Tuner's Guild websit http://www.ptg.org which has a great forum...