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In the late 1980s, a very kind, very good, and very old piano teacher decided she would do a final recital for her students. To make it special, she was going to use 6 pianos and do a kind of piano ensemble for the finale.

For the recital, she had her piano moved to an elementary school stage. She then rented the other 5 pianos from a furniture store that "also sells pianos."

I showed up the morning of the recital to tune the six pianos for that evening's recital. Her piano was in decent shape since I would tune it roughly every six months. The other five? They were a blend of 80s vintage Wurlitzer spinets and consoles, all a minimum of 100 cents flat. Seems the furniture store sold pianos as a sideline and didn't really care much about keeping them in tune while they sat on the floor.

That was not a fun day.

I can well imagine . . .
Sounds like an emporium that was here in my town when we first moved here:
Jay's Sewing and Music Center.

Their real business was sewing machines -- which I think they actually knew something about.

But they also featured Wurlitzer pianos and organs. What they stocked was the lower end of the Wurlitzer line. I never was able to discern what the connection between pianos and sewing machines was. AFAIK, never did instore tunings. I guess the sewing machines were good out of the box, so why not pianos?

A friend referred me to a friend of theirs to tune an upright they had been given by "a music teacher." It turned out to be a 1917 Francis Bacon, originally a standard mahogany finish, and this "music teacher" had taken it upon herself to paint the piano white. It appeared that she used latex house paint, and didn't bother with even opening the lid, let alone remove any case parts to do this. It also appeared she had slopped at least two thick coats for good measure (although, she left the inside of the fallboard in the original finish; maybe so the decal didn't get covered up...). As a result, all of the case parts were essentially glued together with paint - even the lid was glued shut. The piano was quite flat, so it obviously hadn't been tuned in decades.

I advised the customer that if they wanted me to work on it, I was going to have to break apart all of those painted-together joints, and I wouldn't be responsible for any resulting damage. They were okay with that, so crack! crack! crack! I went. I didn't break anything, but what I found inside was the filthiest piano I've ever worked on. Moths and mice had been at work, so most of the felt and cloth was badly chewed; mouse poop and drifts of chewed-up felt were everywhere. The bridle straps were pretty much rotted to nothing, and the piano was impossible to play with so many of them gone, so I sold them on a bridle strap replacement, along with a pitch raise. Since the piano was so dirty, I went ahead and stripped it down to the key bed. There were more drifts of filth in the key frame. I felt like I needed a biohazard suit to work on this thing.

I came back to touch it up three months later. The owners didn't seem thrilled with the work I had done. They seemed to expect that the $250 they spent on me working on it was going to totally transform their piano into a great-sounding instrument.

Oh well...

But other than that it was OK?

Keith, you're killin' me!

Actually, other than that, it was a typical neglected old upright.

Yes, exactly! So here were these brand new pianos sitting on the floor for years, no tunings since the factory. By the time I got home that night, I don't know what felt worse; my arms or my ears. On top of that, I worried about how well the pianos would stay in tune with each other. She was happy though, and I never ever saw those pianos again. And that was fine with me!

Piano teacher that used the old Baldwin Lab Pianos. Electric-acoustic hybrids, these tuned from the back. She had about six of them. Only one word to describe it: TERRIBLE!

Oh do I remember those! Those were awful to work with.

I've had several worst jobs and curiously all of them that I can remember involved bars. Bar owners must operate on a razor thin margin. All of the pianos are horrible, and the lighting in those places ranges from minimal to non-existant. The worst, I guess, was the one where some early clientele insisted on singing along with my efforts to tune a piano with very loose tuning pins.

Baldwin Electro-Pianos? Oh yes...a college I worked for had 18 of those in a classroom. DO you realize that I had managed to completely drop them from my 'worst' category? I had literally not thought about them for 15 years....and NOW you guys bring it all back. AAAaaaaaarrrrgh!

Sitting behind the piano, reaching over to tap the keys, a handful of clinky, clonky wire, pins driven backwards into a poor imitation of a pinblock.....(sigh) Start at 6PM and finish when you can, Mr. Tunerman...all 18...all night long. Classes start at 8AM. Well...as there were so few strings, each piano took only a 1/2 hour or so, but that still took me until the wee hours of the morning to get through.

But the worst job? Worst??? That would be telling a family that the piano Mom bought with saved egg-money in the 30's is now dead, and beyond their budget to fix. THAT'S the worst job, my friends.

Gee!
Thanks!
Yr. svt.,

Some mouse damaged pianos have been rather bad!

I had a customer call and complain of sticking keys. When I opened up the piano mice droppings rubbing between the keys was the culprit. The entire piano (every nook and cranny) was filled with dog food. The mice were getting stored up for the winter.

Ya did it wrong. The way that was demonstrated by an official Baldwin factory tech was to sit on it like a horse. That's right. . . mount it so one leg is over the keys and the other in back. Then (if you are right handed), hit the key with the left hand and tune with the right.

Sounds unorthodox . . . . well, actually, bizarre . . . but it worked! Thankfully, they are no more. Although . . . the action was creative.

(I actually sold one of those -- when I was a Baldwin dealer!)

I opened up an old Wurlitzer console at a rural church one time and the mice came running out at me. That got intense for a few minutes. LOL

A dead mouse crushed under the keys, recent enough to be stinky!

Gak!

How did you handle that?

Me, I probably would have horked on the spot...

And that's exactly what I did! A college here used to have a Baldwin lab (they took it out in the early 90s). I used to straddle them to tune. I felt really strange about it, but hearing a Baldwin tech confirm it makes me feel better.

Yes, indeed.

I was a latecomer to servicing these contraptions. (How I got roped into it is another story.) By the mid-1990s, all local group teachers had thrown the stinky little buggers out in favor of keyboard computer systems. That is, all but this one. Tried tuning them every which way. (Even wondered: Would hanging like a bat work .) My colleague at the Baldwin dealership was too busy laughing to offer anything constructive.

With parts also failing, calls to both Baldwin tech services in Conway and Trumann produced only statements of denial: "We've never heard of 'em." But such provided the perfect excuse to service these no longer. Still, the teacher not wanting to give the things up, finally said, "You know, Jerry (her last tuner) used to bring a mirror on a stand with him."

That was the one way I never tried.

Had to tune a piano in Toronto quite a few years back and the home was just around the corner from the slaughterhouse/meat processing plant. It was summer, a really hot day, no air conditioning and the smell was horrific. I ended up getting nauseous and cancelling the rest of the day out.