Tiny tools: This mute maintains harmony
Next up in our series about employees and their work tools, discover how a simple felt wedge helps Carolina’s pianos stay in tune.
In this series, The Well looks at a variety of tiny tools that Carolina staff and faculty use in their work, each tool’s function and its importance.
Employee: Max Mitler, piano technician, music department.
Tool: Mute, 6.75 inches by 1.5 inches.
Mitler tunes pianos used by the department’s students, faculty and guest performers and concert pianos at Memorial Hall for departmental performances and Carolina Performing Arts events.
His top tool is a mute, a tapered piece of felt that he wedges between strings to isolate and quiet them. Mutes come in standard sizes, but this handmade mute makes Mitler’s job easier and more efficient. He once saw Steinway & Sons technician Eric Schandall use a longer, heavier mute fashioned from a scrap of felt. “Piano hammers are made from a big sheet of felt that’s tapered, then wrapped around a molding and sliced by a big machine. You can acquire scrap felt from the companies.”
Years later, Mitler duplicated Schandall’s design.
He uses the mute daily. Its thickness narrows from 3/8 inch to 1/16 inch, making it easy to wedge between strings.
“Most notes on a piano have three strings that are tuned together to make one sound called a unison. Tuning unisons is a big part of piano tuning. I start by tuning one string while muting off the other two strings. I fill in the unison by tuning another string to the one I just tuned and then tuning the remaining string to the previous two.
“There’s a heft to a felt mute. It’s easy to hold and move around, and its length puts it near where my hand naturally sits while I tune. There’s a good deal of repetitive motion in tuning pianos. This tool definitely reduces some of that stress.”
