Wow--I couldn't be happier with Mary Beth's services! :D…read more
I'm the proud owner of a Yamaha CP-70B, a rare stage piano that, instead of a soundboard, sports pickups under all the strings and plugs in to a guitar amplifier. I mostly play classical, and it works surprisingly well to this end.
I'd just moved the instrument from Denver to Sterling, VA, and and top of that I hadn't tuned it for nearly a year. It was in dire need of some TLC. While I'm capable of tuning the instrument myself (and doing a decent job of it for an amateur), I decided I'd rather save myself the hassle and hire a pro, so I found Mary Beth here on Yelp.
She arrived to our appointment precisely on time. She spiffed up a few of the frictive keys with some lubricant, marveled at the unusualness of my instrument, and then proceeded to fulfill my equally unusual tuning request: Thomas Young's well temperament @ A=432Hz (well temperaments, you might be interested to know, are well-suited to classical/romantic/baroque music, because while all keys remain playable, each key possesses its own character, and pieces from this era were written to take advantage of those characters, whereas in modern equal temperament, all keys sound exactly the same). I don't know whether she'd performed such a tuning before, but she happily obliged me. I left to perform some errands, and about an hour and a half later she called me to let me know she had finished (wow, tuning it myself usually takes like four hours!).
Upon first touch, the sonority of my modest little instrument absolutely captivated me! Never before has it sounded quite like this, so enchanting, so charming, so charismatic in all its registers. Proof? Proof's right here!
https://soundcloud.com/steven-clauson/op-48-no-2-sample
My Chopin's a little rusty as a result of not having played much piano in about a year, but now that my instrument sounds so wonderful I'm going to be playing it every single day. I know I've found my go-to tuner. Thank you so much, Mary Beth!
