Shorty

Ever feel you're being watched?

Very interesting day last week. Went to tune a 1957 British Bentley. Yes, not only do they make cars, they also make pianos! No, different Bentley.

What a treat. A very strange little thing. The bottom board is more of a small cabinet.

But the strangest part was that it only had 85 keys. From what I understand, this was the original number of keys pianos had up until around 1880 when most manufacturers switched to the now-standard 88 keys. So, to find a piano manufactured in the 1950s with only 85 keys is perplexing. It's a small piano, but you don't really save that much space by knocking out three keys.

Modern pianos end on C8, whereas this stops at A7. 

This created a slight problem. The piano hadn't been tuned in a very long time and required an overpull. TuneLab has a very clever little calculation programme on it, which listens to C, E and G in every octave, then tells you how much to overpull by in order for everything to sound roughly correct by the end. The problem of course being, we couldn't find an 85-key tuning option and it insisted on listening to C8 in order to complete the programme...

The eventual fix was to play A7 and then delete it from the recorded notes. This seems to work, but it would be helpful if the app had an 85-key option.

Anyway, it was a pleasure to play with, though there was some rust damage and we lost a bass and a treble string along the way. Given how old many of the pianos we see are, and the humid conditions they're often kept in, it's not unusual to lose a string along the way, especially as many haven't been tuned in years, but it's a bit unusual to lose two. We've ordered a new bass string, but it will need to come from Germany, so may take some time.

We also tuned a well-travelled Rubinstein, which has been all over the world, originally bought in Armenia and arriving here via Tanzania, like the Bugesera Hamilton.

It was a bit of a wander through the back streets of Kigali, but eventually we found it.

A full 88-key display. However, we're having some trouble dating it as the online piano calculator doesn't seem to list Rubinstein and there's not much else to go on. If anyone has a serial number manual, it's 224392, and we'd be greatful for the manufacture date and any other information about Rubinsteins. It sports one of the most convoluted mute-rail system ever seen. Thankfully it's in good working order and looks to have been much played over the years.