SANTA BARBARA CHAPTER
December Meeting: (2nd Monday)
Date: Monday, December 14, 2020
Time:
7:00 pm
Location: Your Device
The Santa Barbara Chapter continues to meet via Zoom, which actually works rather well considering our geographic spread along the Southern/Central California coast.
Several members of our chapter participated in some mechanical triage of a half-dozen small uprights that the Santa Barbara Bowl Foundation usually puts out on the streets during the holiday season for public use. This year, due to the pandemic, they will instead be placed in private venues and used for recorded/streamed performances by local musicians. These pianos are donated and some of them are used year after year. They have each been painted by a local artist. Our challenge was to get them into decent (not great) working order in only a couple hours. It was a fun afternoon for those members who participated and a unique experience and opportunity to practice assessing the most pressing and realistically resolvable needs of each instrument, then making the repairs/adjustments quickly.
At our November meeting we covered random technical topics from field work, ranging from smoke smell abatement to bass wire cleaning/polishing to tool recommendations. Our pre-recorded program of hammer shaping and shank repairs was deferred to next month due to technical difficulties.
We typically skip a December meeting in favor of a holiday meal gathering, but since it is not safe to gather in person this year, we have a Zoom meeting planned for Monday, December 14 at 7:00 pm.