Classic yet bittersweet---a studio story

[David Andersen]

I was called into a world-famous Hollywood recording studio to tune  
and "voice" the 20-year-old Yamaha CF concert grand; I'd never set  
foot in the studio or seen the piano. It was a jazz session, an up- 
and-coming singer, Janis Mann, with a bunch of legendary monsters  
playing on the date: Peter Erskine, Roy Purdy, Joe LaBarbera (drums);  
Chuck Berghofer and John Clayton (bass); Tamir Hendelman (piano,  
arranger) and Diane Schur (vocals, piano).

Friday 8AM---the direction was to tune it and spend one more hour  
"voicing," which means, in reality, "whatever you can do to make it  
sound and feel better and more friendly to the player and the  
microphones." The piano was essentially on pitch---nice---but the  
action was nasty: shallow, noisy, never regulated, the hammers with  
fairly deep, 12mm-long string cuts, so the tone was pinched,  
metallic, harsh, and quick-decaying. When I plucked strings, the  
piano sang like a bird---there was something beautiful in there.   
What to do in an hour, and I mean 60 minutes maximum?

1. Removed the action, unscrewed the felt-covered action rest block  
on the left side of the action cavity, placed .75mm
hard cardboard shims behind, and remounted the rest block, in effect  
shifting the entire action to the right between .5 and 1 mm at rest:  
new felt. Greatly improved sustain, much stronger fundamentaI and  
lower partials.

I calculated how far to shim the action by trial and error, using my  
eyes to watch the hammers and using the shift pedal, using my ears as  
the final arbiter on test notes in each section. I then readjusted  
the action frame stop screw on the inside of the treble cheekblock 1  
mm farther in to compensate for the change in the rest block position.

2. With the Pianotek shank flange hammer alignment tool, I made  
slight tonal adjustments, especially in octave 5 and 6, by slight  
movement of the hammer's left-to-right position.

3. Most of the action noise was coming from the squeaking knuckles,  
and the "popping jacks," a noise that occurs when the edge of the  
jack is way behind the knuckle core---in other words, when the felt  
on the regulation button has compressed, and the action has been  
unregulated over thousands of hours of play. So I removed the action,  
regulated an agressive (slightly toward the player) jack position and  
worked powdered Teflon into the knuckles. The repetition springs  
weren't bad; I strengthened maybe 12 notes.

4.  I quickly raised the hammerline 1mm throughout the piano, and  
picked up a nice little aftertouch.

5. The player complained of "sharpness; are the notes in the treble  
tuned sharp?" Not technically; the piano dictated a mild stretch to  
achieve beatless triple octaves---but because of the neglect of the  
piano, there were all kinds of shrieks, ghosts, and space monkeys  
coming from the top two octaves. The fix? I pulled the last two  
octaves down a bit, say slightly flat on the triple octave, maybe a  
6-8 cent change, and with a needle broke through the lacquer crust  
some idiot burdened those hammers with at some point, then shoved the  
action back in, Tamir tried it---and a smile came on the piano  
player's face.

OK. Then he left to rehearse with the singer, and Bill Smith, veteran  
record producer and engineer, asked me to play the thing some so he  
could dial in a sound.  I did, and within 3 or 4 minutes he said over  
the talkback system
"Yeah, man, s**t, that sounds great" with a relieved and happy lilt  
in his voice, and I knew I was a battlefield triage hero one more  
time. Whew. And just 5 minutes to spare.

The beauty of the "voicing," the slight shifting of the action's rest  
position, is that  for the next rock band that comes in and says,  
"dude, the piano's too mellow," all it takes is 5 minutes to remove  
the shims, reregulate the una corda travel, and bingo! Instant  
trashy, smashy, tinkling and crashy, nasty, nasty tone.

Which is why I hardly ever tune in studios these days; very few let  
me maintain the instrument properly, even with me "nagging,"  
teaching, and showing the difference, so I pass. That's why I'm  
putting a piano of mine in a beautiful old studio recently taken over  
by an artisanal, very successful recording engineer and producer:  
we'll have a great, reasonable, good-vibe studio, world-class mikes  
and gear, with our great piano in it. Attractive? I think so.

Have a great Sunday, everyone. We're working on an amazing surprise  
or two for Kansas City....stay tuned. 
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