Cadek Music Conservatory has been around for decades but found themselves without a home this year. GPS picked them up and made a very nice place for them. They remodeled a small building, which was their old business office, into a space to accommodate multiple piano teaching studios, a piano lob, ensemble practice room and more. And in the winter when the leaves fall off the trees a beautiful view of the river appears. You can find them at Cadek.org or GPS.edu. Below is a picture of the building that is being remodeled.
GPS is taking this seriously and has not only put money into the facility with individual heat and AC units in each studio but they have picked 19 pianos to fix up! The pianos at Cadek had been neglected for years aside from tunings.
The first time I saw the pianos was last fall (2016), although I had been tuning for GPS for at least three years. I was called upon to do an inventory analysis of all their pianos. I had to look at about 15 or so. I was excited to see some great pianos in the mix like the Steinway B in good shape. Most of them were in poor condition and 3 were not even usable although they were being used. Yikes! One of those had cracks in the soundboard so large I could see right through to the floor! But the great thing was the majority could be decent teaching pianos again with a little work which GPS was glad to have done.
I was not sure if this deal was ever going to happen but I received an email mid summer with a go-ahead. There were to be 19 pianos repaired, regulated and tuned and the mix was going to have some Cadek and some GPS pianos, which I had also looked over the previous year.
I have done 7 pianos and tuned 8 thus far. The repairs I have faced so far include: Re-pinning the hammer center pins, Re-engineering the sustain pedal on a Steinway L, Re-bushing the keys (balance and front rail) and misc. broken parts such as hammer shanks and stripped cheek block screw holes.
The regulation work has included hammer filing and voicing, stack regulation and damper system regulation as well as any unique issues from piano to piano.
I hope to do a few posts of some of the more interesting work I am doing here. I have had a blast so far, done a little less than half of them and can’t wait to get going on the other half!