A 440

[Kristinn Leifsson]

I did that yesterday.

A lady that bought an overdamper piano in an antiques store in Denmark... 
duhhh...   hadn´t had it tuned for twenty years.

It was a (musical) half step flat.

Strings had a hint of rust, and the tuning pins were ugly looking.
There was this white condensational stuff around  some places that gave me 
a bad feeling.  Have no idea what that was.
Tuning pins still had some element of "tightishness" in them.

The bass and tenor were actually a lot sharper than the rest.  Which made 
me worry about pin block separation, but no areas were excessively flat, so 
I didn´t know about that.  This huge piano was standing on tiny wheels on a 
soft wooden floor.  Just me and her in the house, so I decided not to pull 
it forward to look at the block.  The sound board, however was totally 
undamaged giving me a hint of the overall wood state, so I went ahead and 
tuned it, and LOWERED the bass.
She just used it herself a little bit, didn´t even play it any more since 
the dampers hadn´t damped since the last time it was moved.

I tuned it where it was, and fixed the damping.

She´s (knowledgeably) happy.  I´m (omnisciently) happy.

It sounded "O.K." as well as these things can sound,( Terry Farrell, that´s 
my input for your previous post :) )
But oh, did my relatively well trained relative pitch sense shudder when 
that song that I played "just didn´t seem right"

No regrets and best regards,

Kristinn Leifsson,
Reykjavík, Iceland




At 19:03 7.9.2000 -0700, you wrote:
>List
>A customer called to have his piano tuned but said the last tuner would not
>bring it to A 440  How do you determine at what pitch you tune  and which
>pianos should not be tuned at A-440. Thank you for your help. Pat Neely