NOBLE — Deyrl Kastner has been in tune with pianos for quite some time, and he should be. He’s been adjusting their pitch for more than 28 years.
Kastner said years ago he had a friend who tuned pianos at church. The friend suggested he learn how to tune pianos, too. After considering it, Kastner decided to get into the business for retirement and enrolled in a mail-order course offered by the American School of Piano Tuning in California.
“It was a year-long correspondence course,” Kastner said. “I tuned a lot of pianos for free while I was learning. I’ve been tuning ever since.”
Kastner has had the opportunity to tune many pianos over the years. During his beginning years in music, he started out volunteering and working part-time.
By 1972, he was “led into full-time church music,” which he has been doing for 38 years now, he said. For 30 of those years, he’s served at Noble’s First Baptist Church as associate pastor, music leader and Sunday school leader.
“It was a natural for me to do pianos, since that was my life, as far as music goes. My wife [Betty] and I have been a team for 50 years. She’s been my [music] partner for 30 years,” he said. “I do not play piano. I chord. I haven’t had to [play] since Betty played.”
At times, Kastner uses a machine called a strobe to aid in his tuning work. He said he adjusts pitch by using a combination of tuning by ear and using the strobe.
“I’m more comfortable keeping it accurate with an electronic tuner. In school, they teach you by using a tuning fork. After you learn it all by ear, you proceed to whatever method you feel most comfortable with. If there’s not electricity nearby, then you do it strictly by ear,” he said.
For instance, Kastner belongs to the Singing Churchmen of Oklahoma men’s choir, which is made up of Southern Baptist Church music directors. Every three years, the choir goes on a mission trip and has been to Russia, China, Australia and, most recently, to Armenia. As a member of the set-up team for the choir, Kastner’s task is to make sure the piano to be used during the performance is in good order.
On one occasion, there was no light on the stage. In fact, there was no electricity at all.
“I tuned the piano with a flashlight and no electricity. It can be done, if you have to,” Kastner said. He chuckled and added, “This country boy has been able to travel all over the world [and] I’ve had the opportunity to tune pianos all over the world with that group.”
According to Kastner, regular maintenance is healthy for a piano. Regular tunings are important because, if pianos are not tuned regularly, the strings will stretch and go out of pitch according to the seasons. Pianos tend to go sharp during rainy seasons and flat during dry times. An annual tuning takes care of seasonal fluctuations.
Some pianos, like those in churches that must match pitch with an organ or other keyboard, require more frequent adjustments to ensure they correspond to other instruments.
“The frequency of tuning depends on how closely the musicians want the instruments to sound to each other. A stand-alone piano can stretch longer between tunings. You can tune a guitar each time before you play it, but a piano has to be played as you find it,” Kastner said.
He explained that if it rains during the course of a week or if there’s a weather change of another kind and a technician were to put a tuning device, such as a strobe, on the piano, the strobe would indicate a fluctuation in the instrument’s tuning. Kastner said that the human ear might not pick up on that difference if the piano isn’t tuned to another instrument.
Kastner clarified that, although a piano has 88 keys, it has 224 strings. This is due to the upper register striking three stings at one time to make a note. The keys in the tenor, or mid range, strike two strings each, and the last dozen keys in the bass range strike single strings.
Kastner maintains that, with 4,700 working parts on a piano, “They’re a little more intricate than what you may think.”
He explained that when the action is slow or sticky, all of those parts come into play. When there’s a problem with a piano, the instrument must be adjusted with a process more complicated than that of tuning a guitar.
Even the pedals on a piano are important because of the sustaining sound they produce. Without the pedal, if pianos operated strictly by striking the keys, the sound would dissipate as soon as the key was hit. The right pedal creates a sustaining sound. The left pedal moves the hammer closer to a string, creating a softer sound — except on a grand piano, where the left pedal moves the entire key bed to the right, causing the hammers to strike two strings not three — thereby making the sound softer.
Through the many years that Kastner has tuned and maintained pianos, he said he’s never advertised. He works on referrals only, and over the course of 28 years, he’s acquired more than 900 customers.
“Depending on referrals keeps me busy,” he said.
Kastner can be reached at 872-3118 to schedule a tuning.
