Musical Instrument Repairers and Tuners
Tasks
Core Tasks Include:
- Play instruments to evaluate their sound quality and to locate any defects.
- Adjust string tensions to tune instruments, using hand tools and electronic tuning devices.
- Disassemble instruments and parts for repair and adjustment.
- Inspect instruments to locate defects, and to determine their value or the level of restoration required.
- Repair cracks in wood or metal instruments, using pinning wire, lathes, fillers, clamps, or soldering irons.
- Reassemble instruments following repair, using hand tools and power tools and glue, hair, yarn, resin, or clamps, and lubricate instruments as necessary.
- Compare instrument pitches with tuning tool pitches to tune instruments.
- String instruments, and adjust trusses and bridges of instruments to obtain specified string tensions and heights.
- Repair or replace musical instrument parts and components, such as strings, bridges, felts, and keys, using hand and power tools.
- Polish instruments, using rags and polishing compounds, buffing wheels, or burnishing tools.
- Shape old parts and replacement parts to improve tone or intonation, using hand tools, lathes, or soldering irons.
- Make wood replacement parts, using woodworking machines and hand tools.
- Mix and measure glue that will be used for instrument repair.
- Refinish instruments to protect and decorate them, using hand tools, buffing tools, and varnish.
Supplemental Tasks Include:
- Align pads and keys on reed or wind instruments.
- Adjust felt hammers on pianos to increase tonal mellowness or brilliance, using sanding paddles, lacquer, or needles.
- Solder posts and parts to hold them in their proper places.
- Remove dents and burrs from metal instruments, using mallets and burnishing tools.
- Wash metal instruments in lacquer-stripping and cyanide solutions to remove lacquer and tarnish.
- Test tubes and pickups in electronic amplifier units, and solder parts and connections as necessary.
- Deliver pianos to purchasers or to locations of their use.
- Cut out sections around cracks on percussion instruments to prevent cracks from advancing, using shears or grinding wheels.
- Refinish and polish piano cabinets or cases to prepare them for sale.
- Solder or weld frames of mallet instruments and metal drum parts.
- Remove drumheads by removing tension rods with drum keys and cutting tools.
- Assemble bars onto percussion instruments.
- Remove irregularities from tuning pins, strings, and hammers of pianos, using wood blocks or filing tools.
- Repair breaks in percussion instruments, such as drums and cymbals, using drill presses, power saws, glue, clamps, grinding wheels, or other hand tools.
- Clean, sand, and paint parts of percussion instruments to maintain their condition.
- Replace xylophone bars and wheels.
- Strike wood, fiberglass, or metal bars of instruments, and use tuned blocks, stroboscopes, or electronic tuners to evaluate tones made by instruments.
- Place rim hoops back onto drum shells to allow new drumheads to dry and become taut.
- Assemble and install new pipe organs and pianos in buildings.
- Cut new drumheads from animal skins, using scissors, and soak drumheads in water to make them pliable.
- Stretch drumheads over rim hoops and tuck them around and under the hoops, using hand tucking tools.
- Remove material from bars of percussion instruments to obtain specified tones, using bandsaws, sanding machines, machine grinders, or hand files and scrapers.
- File metal reeds until their pitches correspond with standard tuning bar pitches.
The data sources for the information displayed here include: O*NET™. (Using onet28)
