did i tell you we got a piano? well we did. for free.

it came from my wife’s parents; they’d had it for years and it was pretty much collecting dust. so when they upgraded their living room furniture they were out of room for it and asked us if we wanted it….to which i said “um, yes please.”

i took piano lessons as a kid and hated it. i didn’t like music theory (still don’t, in fact) and got tired of only playing songs from John Schaum’s Beginner Book A or whatever it was. they all had stupid names, too, like “tune of the tuna fish”. i’m not even kidding. so i quit, and was pretty much devoid of music until i found the guitar right before college.

anyway, i’ve wanted to tinker around with the piano a lot in the past couple years. i still have my old casio keyboard, but playing something like that doesn’t exactly leave you inspired when it sounds really fake and the keys have no weight. there are no ups and downs or soft and loud and that really takes away from the enjoyment of it if you ask me. so having a real piano around i figured would be awesome – i could re-tech myself stuff i’d forgotten and try to relearn the thing. i’m really intrigued by the idea of trying to write music on it instead of the guitar…my theory is that if i write on an instrument i don’t know as well that i might not be so boxed in by the chords i generally keep returning to and that i might end up more inventive with it. that remains to be seen, though.

so the big problem with the piano (aside from getting it inside the house, which ended up taking 5 dudes) was its out-of-tune-ness. i don’t think they’d touched it in literally 15 years, much less tuned it. so it had seen better days. i’d heard you can pay quite a bit to get a piano tuned…so between my general lack of interest in spending a lot of money and my general interest in the instrument, i decided on a different route – learning to tune it myself.

so i got an apprentice piano tuning kit on ebay, set about googling, and got to work. i mean the thing is basically like a huge guitar inside – everything is strings, and you tune each string. but the kicker is that there are a lot of strings. i mean tons. it’s like a frikkin’ spider web in there.

and it’s immensely time-consuming, although the technique does get easier the more i do it. but i’ve basically got it figured out. and while i won’t say it’s perfect by any means, it’s basically in tune now and aside from the sticky keys here and there i’m quite happy with it!

what’s really amazing is how much more sense this instrument makes to me now years later, having learned another. since i’ve mainly always been a ‘by ear’ type of musician, even just knowing the sound of things that go together really helps. not to mention which chords go with what and stuff like that. so now i’m relearning in a different way; figuring out what the chords are by playing around, figuring out a few variations, and playing bits of songs i already know the chords to. it’s been a lot of fun so far. again i’m excited to see where writing on it takes me….just kind of sitting down and seeing what comes out. but i’m not quite there yet.

as far as the rest of music; i redid my booklet today and resubmitted to tunecore. so, as soon as they approve we’ll submit it to itunes and then we just wait until it’s up. pretty cool.