I’ve been working on some more posts, but as I was writing I realized that there are lots of terms that I’m using that aren’t exactly known by the general population (a.k.a. anyone who isn’t a piano technician), so I thought I would just make a post that could serve as a glossary of sorts, to avoid the clunkiness of defining terms in the middle of a riveting story.
Upright Piano: this type of thing...
Grand Piano: this type of thing...
Action: the mechanical portion of the piano, everything from the keys to the hammers
Spinet: an upright piano whose action sits below the keys, instead of above (“drop action”); technicians tend to get very annoyed at spinets.
Regulation: adjusting all of the action parts to the correct specification, so they move where and when and how they’re supposed to
Field Work: this is when I go out to people’s homes (or churches, or schools, etc…) to service pianos; can be anything from just a tuning, to medium-sized repair jobs.
Shop Work: this is work I do in my workshop, or otherwise not “on location,” as it were; usually bigger repair or restoration jobs (restringing, structural repairs, etc.)
Harmonics: whole number multiples of a fundamental frequency (you may have heard these called overtones).
Partials: like harmonics’ awkward cousin; slightly less perfect in mathematical value, due to the physics of piano strings’ mass and stiffness; these are what I listen to while I’m tuning.
Temperament: “the adjustment of intervals in tuning a piano or other musical instrument so as to fit the scale for use in different keys,” is what I found on the internet; temperament (specifically Equal Temperament – but don’t even get me started on that) is one of those things that is so fundamental to what I do that I have a hard time distilling it down to an easily understandable definition.
Oky doky! Hopefully this will help me with my feelings of paralysis with publishing more posts (we’ll see…). I’ll link back to this post as needed, and I’ll also probably have to have a “Part II” of basic terms sometime in the future.
Do you have any other terms you're wondering about? Let's hear it in the comments!
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