On 9/2/01 1:33 PM, "Ron Nossaman" <RNossaman@KSCABLE.com> wrote: > How can one compute charges on something they can't define? Last I heard, tuning fees are arbitrary, and don't necessarily reflect the actual work needed to get a specific piano in tune; why shouldn't pitch raise charges be arbitrary as well? I don't always charge for a pitch adjustment (guess that means I'm not invited to comment here), but I am not offended by the practice of other techs who charge for pitch raises in order to "punish" the customer because it's been too long since the last tuning. I have a rather involved method for using CyberTuner to determine the overall pitch level of a piano, but I am not offended by the practice of other techs who simply measure A4 and compute charges based on the starting pitch of A4. Computing pitch correction charges based on the starting pitch of A4 is a simple and consistent method for quoting a price and getting customer $ approval before starting the work. Determining "how far off pitch the piano is" is a rather different problem from that of computing pitch raise charges. Pitch raise mode in RCT has a neat feature in that it can automatically measure and store the starting pitch of each note. I use this feature for a few seconds on every piano I tune to determine the piano's beginning overall pitch by measuring all the As and all the Cs of the piano. Of course, often pianos are so uneven between sections that they will require a pitch correction pass before they can be tuned to _any_ pitch level. Most often though, the range of pitches of the As and Cs will be small enough that the general pitch level of the piano can be determined to within reasonable tolerances. I am tempted to try to answer a question you posed quite some time ago as to why the top octave of a piano needs overpull when doing a pitch correction. The short answer is because when the research was done to develop the smarts to program into the EDTs, the measurements said the top notes did indeed drop and so overpull was needed. Keep in mind that the original instructions for using the SAT and RCT pitch correction modes involved chromatically tuning A0-C8 pulling in unisons as you go, _and_ the instructions specifically said not to set the string, to simply pull the string up to where the display stops, then let go. Letting go of the hammer without setting the string was a technique for speed that resulted in more drop; and even more drop would occur as the other two strings of the unison were pulled in aurally to match the first string, since a good portion of the drop in a single string appears to come from pulling up the strings in the immediate vicinity of that first string. All that said, the behavior of the top half octave during a pitch raise is less predictable than other parts of the piano; some pianos need little overpull in the top half octave. Kent Swafford
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