The novice

[Ron Nossaman]

>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.
>Clyde Hollinger


Oh he had an idea what he was doing all right, it just  may not correspond
to anyone else's idea of what he should have done. I run into this kind of
thing all the time, and the symptoms differ according to who did the last
tuning. The last guy may have been a lousy tuner, or a "temperamental"
genius. It ultimately doesn't make a bit of difference. I figure that, if
they liked the work, and the guy does work in that area, they would have
called him back. Or if they can't tell any difference, good, bad, or
otherwise, the result is the same. They called you. Mentioning it to the
client wouldn't fix anything, so there's little point to that. Trying to
reconstruct what was in the last tuner's mind when the tuning was done is
really pretty pointless too, for at least a couple of reasons. You don't
know his skill level. You don't know his choice of intended temperament.
Would you know an Inverted Katchenzimmer Variant if you heard one? Would
anyone else? If you were intimately familiar with every variant of every
known or suspected historical temperament, would you be able to determine
if the temperament you see before you was applied to the piano by intent,
or by random incompetence? With a little creativity and a point to try to
make, about any feeble tuning attempt can be given an official sounding
name. Then again, maybe what's left of the last tuning wasn't what the
tuner put there at all. Does the son own a tuning hammer? If not, even
then, someone during the last year might have been rash and foolish enough
to have turned on either the heat or air conditioning and got all those
little air, water, iron, steel, and wood molecules a-dancing at different
rates. After that, heck, it's anyone's ball game.

Ron N