All right, so we've gone through the soundboard. Now we're going to talk about the strings. Strings have a lot of tension on them. The reason I said earlier, one of the reasons to check and see if it's been tuned is that it should be regulated and kept at a fairly stable pitch, and that's what the tunings do. If it hasn't been, first of all, you have a chance of breaking strings when you go to tune it. Finally, there is a point in which they start breaking. These strings are all original. You can tell a piano where they've had breaking strings usually because they'll look different. If you just stare at them and you'll see a bunch of steel and copper strings at the bottom, that's normal. But you'll see one that's bright and shiny on all the rest of their dull. That usually indicates that they've replaced a string. If they've replaced one or two strings, that's a bad sign. Strings are all the same age. They have approximately the same amount of tension on them for their sizes. If you've replaced one or two, then the other ones are close. It's kind of like buying a piano on its last legs. You get a couple of strings broken. You're going to get a couple more when you go to tune it next time possibly. Strings. The next is the pin block and the pins. This piece of wood up here is called the pin block. I have a lot of pianos. They cover this up with a piece of felt or a veneer. You can't see this piece of wood. It's really not critical that you can see it, but you know that it's there. These pins are two and a half inches long. They're really fine threaded screws, is what they are. They go through a hole in this cast iron plate into the chunk of wood called the pin block. Pin blocks are all very hardwoods made to hold those pins really tightly. Just like the soundboard we were talking about earlier, the pin block dries out. It can get to the point where eventually it dries out to the point where the pins aren't tight enough anymore. Kind of like if you have a wooden chair at your dining room table and it gets old and it gets wobbly. Sometimes you can tighten the screws up. You have to do something to take up how much they've dried. When these get bad, when this gets dried out, I'll put my tuning wrench on here to tune it. I'll pull in the tuning wrench to tighten it and I let go and the wrench just spins backward. It can no longer hold the tension of those strings. They can do a couple things to buy a time to get by with a pin block that's going bad. One of which is replacing the pins with larger pins. Depending on how they do it, they could go through and replace a couple here and there. Kind of like the strings, you'll see a couple shiny pins or a couple pins that are different color that stand out. They don't look the same as all the rest. Really what you're looking for is uniformity. Strings, in pins. Something else you can look for in that is to simply play a scale. If the piano hasn't been tuned in a while, it might all be out of tune. But you want it to be consistently out of tune, if that makes sense. So if you're playing along and it goes... And everything seems in order playing approximately the notes they're supposed to. If you however are playing a piano that hasn't been played or a tune, it doesn't matter if it's in six weeks or twenty years. And one note seems really odd. It's way out of tune and all the rest are pretty good. That is an indicator that there might be something wrong. That maybe that pin is loose and it's not holding tune as well as all the strings around it. Trying to think about it. So if you're playing along and you go... That's an exaggeration. I play to note off the... If you're playing all of them in a row and one note is lower way out from the rest, be wary. That's an indication there's possibly something wrong there. So we've gone through the soundboard, the strings and the pin block. Those are the most critical parts. Those are the parts that should last an average of sixty years, less on some of the cheaper pianos and are going to be most affected by regular tuning. If you keep the piano tuning, you keep the piano in a regulated environment, you take care of it right, most pianos last over fifty-sixty years. The last part, and usually the only other part that people look at is the action and the keys and how they're working. And the funny part of that is, is they matter less than those previous three things I talked about. So if you get to a house and there's one key that's stuck down all the time or you play it in a couple of keys or sluggish or you open the top and a hammer's stuck down or something, those are all things that can be fixed usually, easily, not always, but usually fairly easily. So that is less of a problem than the strings and the pins and the soundboard. But usually when people go that don't know anything about pianos, go looking for pianos, they hear the thing people say, oh I haven't tuned it in a long time, they don't think anything of that, it's a big deal. But they do look at the piano and they say, oh there's two notes stuck down, that's probably a terrible piano. And that may not be a big deal at all. So these are just a couple things you can look at, make your little more informs if you go looking at a piano out of Craigslist or eBay or newspaper or something. If you find one and you're just not sure, call us or call your local tuner, we can come out and take a look at it. Art sign music has in stock over 600 pianos and I don't know, two thirds or half of them at least are used pianos. So we have an awful lot of them, not only are they for sale, but we're happy to talk to you, happy to show you things, we can show you some things to look at, we can give you some examples of things. So give us a call, stop by, we'd love to talk to you.