Pictures from My Summer Work

I’ve been very busy lately and haven’t written here much. My wife and I had our third child join us at the end of May and we’ve been very busy ever since!

I’ve run into a lot of interesting and odd instruments over the summer, so I thought I’d share some pictures of some of them here.

First, I’ve been working hard on a harpsichord that I bought this summer and got into my teaching studio. My alma mater, George Fox University wasn’t using their instrument and they gave it to me for a very good price! I worked on this instrument while I was in college, but it has been very gratifying to have more time to get it playing really well. I have also been experimenting with historical tunings, specifically the Lehman-Bach tuning which sounds awesome on the harpsichord.

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The week after I picked up my harpsichord, another harpsichord came into Portland Piano Company and I’ve been working at getting it back into shape. It was extremely dirty, and I found that cleaning the delicate harpsichord is much more time consuming than cleaning a modern piano! One of the two courses of strings had no tension on it at all, so it has taken a lot of tunings to get it stabilized.

IMG_4378I got to tune an interesting Grotrian piano from the 1950’s again this summer. I’ve worked on these pianos before, but I always enjoy coming across them.

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And inside the piano….IMG_4712

I’ve been tuning at Reed College all week and they have 3 harpsichords along with around 25 pianos in their music building. I just tuned a vintage Bosendorfer there this week:

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This little harpsichord was very entertaining. Harpsichords were often custom painted for the owners, inside and out. This tiny instrument has a painting of Reed College buildings inside the lid with “The Swing” in one corner and tonsured monks playing Frisbee in the other corner!

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Those are some of the interesting instruments I’ve run into this summer. I hope you enjoyed those pictures and have a good remainder of your summer. I hard at work getting school pianos in shape before school starts again in a couple weeks!