what pianos are good?

[thepianoarts]

on 12/24/00 8:00 AM, martin store at mstore@nic.fi wrote:

> what pianos are usually good practiseing tuning on? what pianos are easy to
> tune?
> 

Martin,

Great questions.

May I suggest thinking about 'tuning' in two catagories...pitch raising and
fine tuning.

  'Fine' tuning. Fine tuning is what we all want to accomplish. Fine tuning
is only possible to acheive when the piano is 'close' to pitch. If you are
aware of this, you will not become discouraged when you attempt to tune a
piano that is way out of tune, only to find that your results are changing
during the process. In other words, the more out of tune an instrument is,
the more it changes as we are tuning it. The soundboard compresses, the wire
stretches etc. 
   Many of us think in terms of 'pitch raising' and 'fine tuning' as
seperate tasks.  We all have different techniques to tackle pitch raising,
but in general, we expect the piano to change during this process of raising
the pitch. 
   
There are lots of good ways to learn how to tune...
 
I would suggest asking a rebuilder or a tech who is restringing a piano in
your area, if they would allow you to pull a freshly restrng instrument up
to pitch. This will allow you to get a feel as to what happens during the
tuning process. This is not fine tuning, but the experience will go along
way in your education in understanding what happens during tuning...

Dan Reed

Dallas Chapter