Wound trichords in a spinet??? Does an ETD help?

[Farrell]

I've used the SAT and now the Verituner. I (almost) never use the ETD to tune a unison. Once in a while I might use it to evaluate a troublesome unison, but still do the final tuning by ear. I find that I can almost always make bass unisons less offensive with the ear. I have sometimes found the least offensive sound to be had when unisons are two, three, four cents off from one another. I'm sure not saying THAT sounds good, but simply less offensive than  tuning to whatever partial(s) your machine is listening to only.

Regarding how the customer might react to a bad sounding note: That IS a tough one. Bad false beats in the upper treble, and a couple (maybe more?) bass notes where the unison sounds horrid. What do you do? Obviously with a cruddy little piano and a customer that doesn't play much or Susie is just beginning lessons on, you will say nothing but what a pleasure it was to service the little monster. But on a nicer piano where the customer CAN play - I want to say something about the false beats and badly matched bass unisons - something like: "Hey dude, I just wanted to point out that your piano is the pits, and these nasty noises coming out of it are NOT MY FAULT!" But somehow that just does not seem right. Any bright ideas on how to handle that?

Terry Farrell
  
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Piannaman@aol.com>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 3:24 AM
Subject: Wound trichords in a spinet??? Does an ETD help?


> List,
> 
> I just tuned a Betsy Ross spinet made by Lester.  Interesting little pianos.  
> Built with a fair amount of integrity in the materials(no plastic in the 
> elbows of this one).  At least they were trying to make a decent insrument. 
> 
> I thought that I'd tuned a few of them in the past, but I didn't remember 
> that there were at least five  notes below the bass-treble break that were 
> wound tri-chords.  AAArggh.  I guess this would have been the time to use my 
> ETD.  All kinds of ungodly noises emanated from these strings.  I could not 
> get a unison to sound like a unison.  String speaking lengths were different, 
> the windings were bunching up at the top.  
> 
> Has anybody tuned one of these using an ETD?  Any luck with that section??  I 
> guess if it doesn't sound good, at least you can point out that the computer 
> wouldn't lie.
> 
> Frustratedly yours,
> 
> Dave Stahl
>