Concerts in general

[Ron Nossaman]

I just got back from tuning for a Marilyn May deal. This all started about
a week ago when I got the call to arrange the tuning. They were "planning"
two sets, one Friday evening at the Marriott, and one Saturday evening at
the old Orpheum Theater. The piano was scheduled to be moved to the
Marriott at 5:00pm Friday, and the performance was at 7:00. I asked her if
she had ever seen, or even heard of a mover that was ever less than an hour
late that late in the day. Even if they were on time, I'd be trying to tune
the piano (CFIII) during the sound check and forklift races. What do we do?
I decided that the path of least disaster would be to tune the piano in the
store before it left (hadn't been tuned for over six months), move it to
the Marriott, and take our chances. It's a pretty stable piano, and I was
sure it would end up closer to being in tune that way than if I tried to do
it in thirty minutes on site during the sound check and stage hand
stampede. It must have gone OK last night, at least I didn't get any panic
calls, but she called me again this morning. "Do you think the piano will
sound alright for tonight without tuning it after the move?" I said "That's
between the piano and the performer, isn't it?", which just confused her.
She didn't want to spend the money for another tuning if she didn't have
to, and asked if I would "drop by" and check it out to se if it was good
enough after the move! I said sure, for the price of a service call, but
then who's call is it as to whether or not it's adequate? That only seemed
to confuse her more, so she decided that, for the price, the piano would be
just fine as it was, so I went out to chase down some errands. When I got
back to the house at 1:10, there was a rather terse message on my answering
machine (from the tour manager, not the local "facilitator") saying that
the piano WOULD be tuned before tonight's performance, that they were doing
a warm-up at 2:00, and they would like to have it tuned by then. HA! I
called the theater and attempted to communicate with the person at the
phone. She proved to be pretty lucid, and we eventually arrived at the
truth that the performers weren't about to hold up their warm-up for me to
tune, and I'd have to come at 5:00 for the tuning. I arrived at 4:45,
finally got to the piano at 5:10, touched up as necessary and wrapped up at
5:35, left a bill, and escaped with my life. In deference to the minimum
time served on the actual "tuning", I didn't even levy a "dipstick"
surcharge. If the piano had been nearly anything else than a CFIII, I'd
still be there. Incidentally, the unison touch up consisted mostly of
tweaking the shortest (left) string of the unison, just to add another
layer of aggravation and drag a dormant thread back into the room. I
thought you'd like to know. <G>

This is in contrast to the same gig I tuned in another town last week,
where the arrangements were made months ago, and everything went
beautifully... as always. I guess SETI is looking in the wrong direction
only *some* of the time, and Murphy was only moderately optimistic.

Such is life in DoDah.

One more day left to get well before it STARTS again!



Ron N