Know-a Piano

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I initially contacted Noah via his website, and he replied via e-mail four days later, explaining that he had been on vacation. We exchanged a few messages to arrange a suitable time for him to tune my grand piano, and I also mentioned that a few hammers occasionally seemed to "stick," in that they didn't immediately return to their normal positions after striking the strings. He responded with a plausible explanation for the problem, thereby reassuring me that he was well-qualified to solve it. (Noah is a registered piano technician with the Piano Technicians Guild, so I was already confident I could trust him with my piano, but I nonetheless appreciated his candor.) On the day of the scheduled tuning, Noah arrived a few minutes early. He quickly assessed the problem I had reported, diagnosed it as a "let-off" problem, figured out which keys were actually affected (which turned out to be a few more than I had noticed while playing) and showed me how he made that determination, then explained what adjustments would correct the problem and how easily he could make those adjustments. Noah could be called a "show-and-tell" piano technician, in that he simultaneously showed me what wasn't working right and explained it to me in plain English, then showed me how he would fix it and explained why his solution would work. I left Noah to his craft and, nearly two hours later, my piano had been tuned, the "let-off" problem had been resolved, and he'd also adjusted the pedals to make them more responsive. I doubt my piano has ever sounded better, and I've already told Noah that I expect him to tune my piano regularly from now on.

Easy going and informative.