Nothing like a sick piano to make a piano teacher break out into a sweat. Last Monday one of my students was playing a Chopin Nocturne. Since this student can a time be little gung ho with the arm weight, I recommended trying the Una Corda. It was a good effort, but didn’t produce the desired results so we moved on to other ideas. The next thing I knew the piano was sounding a bit odd and the student said that the und corda pedal was not working correctly. Oh boy. Sure enough it was stuck in the ‘on’ position.
Tuesday morning I called my wonderful tech to set an appointment. The soonest he could come out was next Tuesday. That was a week of odd sounding lessons. I thought it was interesting that some students noticed the strange sound and others didn’t. I many have to explore that issue. So the tech finally made it out today. Turns out that it really was a case of being stuck. A little Teflon power later and we were back in business. The tuning was in pretty good shape so other than some minor adjustments it was a quick fix.
Come back later this week to find out which group of my students has had the best long term success based on what time of year they started lessons. The answer might surprise you