Great pianos still need maintenance

Today I headed out to tune for a famous producer in Miami Beach. His Yamaha C7 was hand selected for his recording studio and sounds pretty awesome. Still, even with pianos that present themselves as having no issues seem to always need something.

The picture to the right is of the hammers. Grooves like that are usually accompanied with a bright sounding instrument. Not the case with this one. Either way, you can't let those string grooves continue to get longer. Suggesting that the hammers need some light filing during the next visit or the one after would be a good idea. Hammer filing of course means some voicing. Since this piano sounds really good now, I decided to keep an eye on the hammers and wait until the piano needs voicing anyway.

Before I could get the action out though I was challenged with a keyslip that wouldn't come out. Turns out the pins that hold it into the keybed were terribly corroded (see left photo below). Definitely and instance where you whip out your Brasso or Noxon and clean those pins up.

Lastly, while tuning I noticed a familiar sound. It takes a little while to know this particular sound but when you can hear it, you know what it is. It's an unbedded keyframe. I was hearing a hollow, woody sound while tuning so I checked it out. The glide around the 5th octave wasn't seated. The tricky thing with larger pianos is that they often have hidden glides only accessible from the bottom of the keyframe (see right photo below). Remember to check them while re-bedding the glides.

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Corroded pins

Hidden glide