It's been a while since my last post. Mostly, it's because I haven't been as motivated to practice, and a large reason is because I feel like my Steinway B is more and more messed up. My arm and fingers kept hurting so I've reosrted to playing on my other electric piano. I've chronicled the downweights on my piano in an earlier post, and of course in additional to that there are a bunch of other issues as well.
I was especially unhappy with how Faust Harrison treated me. First off they charged a rather exorbitant amount (a grand), I thought, for a day's work, which came to something more like 5-6 hours. Secondly, even when I asked them to fix up some things after the humid summer, they dragged on their feet until it has been a few months and they refused to work on it unless I coughed up more money. I would have been more okay if it didn't end up being so messed up, but I found a different technician and he did a monstrously improved job.
So, Arpad Maklary, a Hungary who actually used to work on Zoltan Kocsis's piano, worked on my piano yesterday. He worked on a bunch of things, here are some of the ones I remember:
- Cleaned up the strings by getting rid of the oxidized surface. This has the effect of bringing out the overtones. This, amazingly, made the piano sound much more like a Steinway!
- Raised the levels of the hammers. Apparently, for some reason, the hammers earlier were sitting at around 47-48 mm from the strings. Arpad said the Steinway standard is 44.5 mm. This partially contributes to the piano feeling so heavy. The mechanics appears non-trivial to me because all the moving parts that go on in a piano action, but clearly overall, if the hammer is closer to the string, you would imagine the piano being a bit easier to play.
- Applying lucricants on various parts. Well, this is easy to understand. It reduces the friction at various places and helps both downweights and upweights, the "touch" of a note, etc.
- Replaced a few pins in the bushings. The low G and the 2nd-lowest E are a little sticky, even after lubricating the bushings. So he replaced them. And since I kept complaining about the low D (74 grams before regulation), he replaced that one too. Coupled with all the other work he did, the low D is now <56.7 g! (i.e. 10 quarters, my standard measurement). Nice.
- Tuning. I like his tuning. I don't think it's particularly magical, but stretching the lowest few notes and highest few notes by more than a few cents has very nice effects. The highest C he stretched it by 50 cents. The lowest A I think he stretched it by something ~ 25 cents? Now the bass has a nice sustaining, sororous sound and works very well as pedal notes etc. Playing the lowest C major triad chord sounds awful, however, but it's rarely used so it's okay. I recall that once, in Shanghai, a tuner who gives intruction at the Shanghai Music Conservatory and was the tuner for Lang Lang's piano came to tune my upright and I wondered why after he tuned it the chords in the lower register sound so out of tune. Now I know--they had the same reason.
There are a whole slew of other things he did that I don't remember or don't understand enough (like the backdrop(backcatch?), some screws, putting graphite on a certain part I don't know the name of, the height of the "click", and some others). But he was here from 10:30am to past 8pm--and I'll just say that in comparison, Faust Harrison absolutely ripped me off. My piano now actually sounds like a Steinway, plays like a Steinway and feels like a Steinway. From now on, if there are passages I can't play, I can no longer blame it on my piano :)
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