[CAUT] Thanks for Help/ An Odd Korean piano

[John Pope]

To Those who responded: Thanks for some excellent input on getting interviews.

Now here's something odd I ran across and was wondering if anyone would know something about it. Last year I was hired to tune what seemed to be a cheap Korean grand dating from the 80's. It had "Hyundai" on the plate and "Binder and sons" on the fallboard. The odd thing about it was that all the treble strings were looped, that is, 3 hitch pins per note, like a Boesendorfer. The further odd thing was that after an afternoon of voicing, especialy after taping in the bridge pins, the thing sounded amazingly good for what it was.

Today I tuned it for the 3rd time since our first encounter. Everything about it says cheap 5' piano except for that plate design. The strings are rusted. A few always seem to break in my absence. There is an huge gap between the pin block and the flange, no contact anywhere along the flange. Yet tunings are fairly stable, which makes me less inclined to spend hours fitting the next block I install.

But what I'm wondering is, does the stringing design account for the uncommon quality of tone that I continue to get out this piano?

That voicing job made me look really good. I told the customer when he was about to try it out, that he wasn't going to recognize that piano. He replied, "You're right, I don't. What a pleasure!" I had never had a piano come so far in one day. It had the same old hammers (though I had filed them) and the same old rusty strings, but sounded radicaly different.

John Pope
Centre College
Danville, KY
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/caut.php/attachments/20080504/292f867a/attachment.html