Tuned a Steinway in a sunlit attic today

The client’s daughter had been playing Chopin at 8 a.m. for weeks, and the piano hadn’t been touched since before the pandemic. I found a hairline crack in the soundboard—tiny, but it sang when I pressed the D above middle C. The air smelled like old paper and lemon oil. I didn’t fix the crack. It’s part of the voice now. Sometimes you don’t tune a piano to be perfect—you tune it to remember what it was.