Tuned and Ready

I own a piano. It was a gift from my parents when I passed my Grade 5 piano exam, and my mother started telling people I could "play the piano" rather than I "was learning". It got left at home when I went to University, and that's when I stopped my daily practice and lost a lot of my skills. When I bought my first home we got the piano moved up, and we were re-united.

It's been a little neglected over the last few years. It suffered a broken pedal and the piano tuner I had found didn't recognise the mechanism and was unable to fix it. We moved house almost 15 years ago, and I haven't had it tuned since we moved, because it's hard to find good piano tuners, and I'd been burned a little by my previous experience.

However I spotted a recommendation on the notice board at work, followed it up, and today a lovely piano tuner came and tuned my piano. He reassured me that it was still in reasonable condition, and although showing it's age (he estimates it was built in the 1940s) it has plenty of life left. He wasn't able to restore it to full concert pitch as it was quite flat and he didn't want to stress the strings. But he's brought it up so it's only about a semitone off, and is coming back in 6 months to re-tune it back to concert pitch.

Best of all, he was not at all phased by my broken pedal, has seen the mechanism before and thinks he'll be able to repair it.

To celebrate I treated myself to the Frozen sheet music (easy piano version!) and I'm looking forward to playing again :)