This piano needs tuning. What? Yes, yes … I know it’s missing fourteen keys and there are rodents living in it, but nevertheless, the fact remains that IT STILL NEEDS TUNING. What kind of a place is this, anyway?
Oh, right … THAT kind of a place. I sometimes forget where I’m squatting. Abandoned hammer mills are notorious for having poorly maintained upright pianos. Even the ones that are fortunate enough to get converted to consignment stores or mini-malls are plagued with out-of-tune spinets and uprights. I think it’s the moisture, the rising damp, as it were. In any case, the instrument sitting in what used to be the machine shop here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill has seen better days … and not recently. I do have an old tuning hammer and have tried to wrack it up to somewhere close to concert C, but my reward has been paltry – mostly indents in my forehead from snapping piano strings. Ouch.
Why, you may ask, in this age of electronics do I need to be banging away at an old upright? Good question, nameless interlocutor! There are in fact several reasons:
Reason One: We neglected to pay our power bill. Turns out National Grid doesn’t have a great sense of humor about these things. They pulled the plug on us almost immediately. For a while we had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) chugging along on a treadmill tied to a generator, but, of course, he runs on electricity and, as such, could only generate enough electricity to walk on the treadmill. Sure, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, could come up with some kind of perpetual energy source, but he’s away at one of his innumerable conferences. (They’re planning something, those mad scientists. I just know it.)
Reason Two: We’re freaking broke, so it’s time to make some money at this asinine undertaking. I’ve dusted off my thirty year old edition of the Songwriter’s Market and I’m going to sit here at this piano and write pop songs for the biggies. Lots of ways you can go with this songwriting game, Mack. First … change your name to Mack. Then choose a genre. You might go with love songs, or maybe religious numbers. Hell, you can start with one and then use the same tunes for the other – just change “baby, baby, baby” to “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” or vice versa, and you’re all set. Before you know it, you’ll be looking at the birth of a regular tin pan alley in the Mohawk Valley.
Reason Three: Bored out of my gourd! This is the most boring summer ever. In these COVID-plagued days, what else is there to do but pound on distressed pianos and croon about better times? (Seriously, if you can think of shit to do around here, let us know.)
Right, so …. I realize this isn’t a technical blog. That’s not what you come here for. You come here for pithy observations and gripping tales of pointless adventures. For instance, I could tell you all about the festive autumnal arrangement in the hammer mill courtyard contrived by the mansized tuber in his spare time, but then this would seem like a gardening blog, and it’s anything but that. Or I could tell you about all the lawn signs that were dumped in our driveway following the mid-term elections, but then you’d think this was a political blog, and well …. sometimes it is, but … not just now!
Many instrumentalists leave distinctive marks on their instruments – scratches in the soundboard or pickguard of a guitar, or in the keyboard cover of a piano, that sort of thing. My aging Martin D-1 doesn’t have a lot of marks, mostly because I don’t play it all that much, but also because I suck at using a plectrum. The guitar top and the strings are harder than my fingers; therefore, the instrument leaves marks on me and not the other way around. Matt, on the other hand, is a more traditionally trained guitar player, so his axes are all marked up. It’s been a few years, but when I last saw it his Les Paul Custom looked like a truck backed over it. (That’s what my hands look like.)