On Dec 3, 2008, at 11:21 PM, David Love wrote: > We should differentiate in this continuing discussion between being > able to tune one and enjoying tuning one. There are many pianos > that are poorly designed in terms of tuning pin flag polling that > anyone with experience is capable of tuning. Give me a me a piano > the ease of which might lull me into a false sense of security (a > fairly absurd supposition) anytime. And there are definitely various things which lead one piano to be easier or harder to tune than another. To get a solid tuning, the pin has to be moved very precisely to just the right position, on any piano. All well and good. But pins behave and feel differently depending on various factors, and 1098s of older vintage did/do have that flag-poling extra springiness that makes it difficult to feel small movements of the pin in the block. Coupled with, often, excess friction and a long string length between speaking length and tuning pin. Combine the worst of that, and it can definitely be a piano that isn't fun to tune, like many Baldwin grands of fairly recent vintage (with the 1000 ply pinblock, 500 lb pin torque, and various unmuted and unmutable addition duplex style string segments). One has to wrestle with every single darned pin. I agree, ease of tuning is a definite plus when selecting an instrument, because it is more likely to be in fine tune more of the time (among other things, a less skilled tuner will be more able to do an adequate job), and will take less of the tech's time and effort for tuning, leaving more for other maintenance. And it will make for a happier tuner. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20081204/ec4c2147/attachment.html>
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