SANTA BARBARA CHAPTER
February Meeting: (2nd Monday)
Date: Monday, February 10, 2020
Time:
7:00 pm
Location: Jim Connolly’s Piano Kitchen
430 Rose Ave., Santa
Barbara
The Santa Barbara Chapter met in January. We are preparing a three-person presentation to the local piano teachers’ association on tuning, regulation and voicing; so we finalized some of those plans. One member reports using a wifi-enabled temperature/humidity sensor installed temporarily near a piano's Dampp-Chaser humidistat to provide data to the technician and the customer as to the piano's environment over a period of time. This proved useful in convincing the customer that environmental changes did, in fact, account for tuning instability which the technician was getting called back to address.
Our major news item is that after a long and successful career, RPT Gary Hammond has retired! Gary has served diligently as Treasurer/historian/record-keeper of our chapter for quite some time, in addition to various positions prior to that. He intends to continue playing and teaching piano, among other pursuits.
In new business, Evan Austin will be teaching a program on piano detailing at the national convention in July. Benjamin Sanchez attended the grand damper regulation & rebuilding class/presentation given by Baldassin and Teal at the Colburn School in L.A.
We briefly discussed the proposal floating at the national level of making RPT exams an independent entity from PTG. At first blush we generally could see more negative than positive potential outcomes, and as a group are unsure of the reasoning behind it.
Our technical session was robust as usual and covered topics ranging from Steinway damper bushing cloths, to claims of a "kiln-dried" action, to how various poor manufacturing materials fail, to tinnitus.
Our program consisted of chapter president Charlie Hudson reporting on the week he spent at the Steinway factory in New York last November for their regulation course. We got a peek into the factory environment and dynamic, as well as several tips and tools used there that could help in our regulations. Consistency is the big push at Steinway, under their "Recommitment to Quality" banner.