Patience, skills and a good ear - JOHN PHILLIPS finds out what's required working in a piano workshop.

FROM the modern Yamaha worth thousands of pounds to the century-old Matz destined for the tip, the pianos in Paul Stevens’ workshop are musical objets d’art with a sentimental and artistic value.

Tuning, repairing and restoring the massive keyboard instruments requires skill, patience and a good ear.

Blind people have traditionally been taught the craft due to their heightened senses, but anyone with a passion for music can develop the skills required to give pianos several lifetimes.

In one corner of Newport, jazz pianist Paul Stevens is busy playing notes and tweaking with strings from the instruments coming in all shapes and sizes.

Under their shiny wooden cases, I find an array of multi-layered iron and copper strings linked to keys producing beautiful sounds.

The basic tools of the trade include a tuning fork which you traditionally tap on your knee to induce vibrations before placing it on a specific key.

The contact between the fork and the key produces a sound capturing its pitch.

The piano tuner then uses a tuning lever to adjust the tension of the relevant string to give the key a perfect pitch.

You can then tune nearby keys to one another using a method known as relative tuning.

Another useful implement is an oblong felt cloth known as a “mute” which is placed between the strings to mute their sound and helps accurately tune the keys.

A piano tuner can spend hours listening to the sounds each key produces, playing them together and tuning them to achieve an overall, crystal-clear sound.

Mr Stevens once spent five hours on a piano which had been soaked after a water leak.

He usually spends five to 10 minutes listening to a piano before starting to work on it.

If a piano is tuned regularly he may need an hour to an hour and a half to give it well-rounded sound.

Pianos are so complex that IT whizzes have yet to figure out how to reproduce the beautiful multi-layered sounds they produce.

Mr Stevens, of Paul’s Pianos in Chepstow Road, tells me digital pianos have not been able to capture the rich and varied sounds each key can produce depending on chord patterns and how hard you hit them.

Mr Stevens goes all over Newport, Gwent, Cardiff and even Barry to tune the treasured instruments in people’s homes. But his job is not just about tuning.

Sometimes, it is not possible to fix the problem on site and Mr Stevens has to take he heavy instruments back to his workshop in Chepstow Road.

He tells me they can weigh around 200kg.

We have a go at lifting a piano in his workshop using a small trolley which we place under its case.

The trick is to lift the lighter side of the instrument, which is invariably on the right where the highest pitched strings are.

Mr Stevens explains that the darker the sound of a key the more ion and copper it needs which makes the string heavier.

He usually requires an assistant who can hang off one side of the piano to lift the instrument like a seesaw thereby enabling him to fit it onto his small trolley underneath.

Mr Stevens has a van but his late mentor Don Clarke moved pianos around in a trailer.

Shifting a piano is no mean feat and he once had to move a seven-foot boudoir grand piano, which took up half a room.

Mr Stevens had understood it was a “baby” grand piano rather than a “boudoir” grand piano.

To make matters worse, the owner had used inches or centimetres rather than feet to give its dimensions, but the piano tuner was still able to take it to his workshop.

The trick for grand pianos, he tells me, is to take off the legs and turn them onto their side and in this case it went through the door but was just two inches from the ceiling.

Mr Stevens also brings pianos back to life using varnish and filler which can help restore the instruments to their former glory.

The oldest instrument in his workshop at the moment is a century-old Matz manufactured in Berlin, which was going to go to a rubbish tip in Newport.

Mr Stevens has already spent some time tuning the instrument, which produces a nice sound and he is planning to fit candle holders on its frame.

Having it taken to the tip would have cost about £20, but with time and effort the German piano could one day fetch £500.

Mr Stevens, 47, said: “You’ve got to love it. Anyone who says they want to buy a digital piano I say to them come into the shop and buy a real piano.

“It’s nowhere near the sound of a piano. You can’t replicate it.

“You do not get the notes singing. They bounce off each other. It’s a sympathetic vibration.

“You don’t really get it from a CD or a recording. You have to be in the room.”

l To have your piano tuned or restored, call Paul’s Pianos, on 01633 280 222.