The novice

[Clyde Hollinger]

Friends,

I am taking this post in a different direction.  Sometimes on the first
visit to a client I find the tuning so strange that I think a novice must
have tuned it the last time.

For example, yesterday I tuned a spinet that I had last tuned in May, 1991,
but the client assured me that someone else tuned it in 1998.  It had been
moved to a son's house and back.  Before I started, the bass was up to 11c
sharp, the treble was up to 28c flat, but what I found unusual was that a
note 12 cents sharp might be next to a note 15 cents flat, and this occurred
throughout although mostly in the center section.

When whole sections of the piano are uniformly out of tune, I can easily
account for that, but when a section has differences of up to 25 cents on
adjacent notes, I can only attribute that to a "tooner" who had no idea what
he was doing.  Am I right?  I decided it was prudent not to express my
thoughts to the client.

Regards,
Clyde Hollinger


> If I were to encounter a piano that had been just tuned to an historical
> temperment I'm sure I'd think that the piano had been tuned by a novice.
>
> Tom Ayers