A piano problem I've never had before

[Josh Paxton]

I was doing a piano-on-a-truck gig earlier tonight, and about halfway through the second set I noticed that a spot on the edge of my left thumb was starting to get rubbed raw, for reasons I could't figure out. As I started paying closer attention to what was happening, I noticed something unusual about this piano. The white keys are basically a piece of wood with a piece of plastic on top of them, and the plastic is the same width as the wood, right? Only on this one, the plastic was just slightly wider than the wood, so it formed a tiny lip on either side. And that lip had a fairly sharp edge, so that if, for example, your thumb happened to scrape against it, it would do some damage. Not at first, mind you, but after a few thousand times you'd start to notice. The worst was when I'd play tenths with a black key on bottom and a while one on top, like Eb to G â which I play a lot.

 

The good news is, the guy who owns it is a piano tuner and rebuilder, so when I pointed it out to him, he said "Oh, yeah, I can totally fix that. I'll just file down the edges." After years of playing club pianos whose owners would raise hell about being asked to so much as have them tuned every couple years, needless to say I was overcome with joy at this response.

 

Anyone ever encountered this before?

[Docbop]

Happens on guitars when you don't watch the humidity where you keep them. The wood of the guitar neck drys and shrinks some so the edge of the frets all start to "sprout" out. Playing a guitar with sprouted frets is like running you hand over a saw blade. Same cure take the guitar to a luthier and they file down the edges of the frets even with the neck again.

[mate stubb]

Wow, that's a new one on me. Sounds painful.