Tuning Complaint - Help!

[Jon Page]

At 03:57 PM 6/6/2002 -0400, you wrote:

>On Thursday, June 6, 2002, at 10:51 AM, Scott & Jason Jackson wrote:
>
>>This has reminded me of visiting a lady many years ago ...
>
>Wow, this is bringing back "old war stories" of difficult customers. 
>Compared to Terry's nice old lady, much greater stress. The one I'm 
>remembering had a K&C spinet, terribly flat & out of tune, which I brought 
>up to pitch. The lady spent most of the time hovering around, drinking 
>heavily and smoking like a chimney (and a TV blaring in the background). I 
>*tried* to explain A440 etc but didn't seem to make much of an impression. 
>She seemed pleased with the results but called back in a couple months 
>informing me that her nephew had played the piano the previous day and he 
>informed her that I had *ruined* the piano by my tuning. She was ranting 
>about over the phone so intensely that attempts to explain about pitch 
>raises etc were going no place fast & she was so out of control that I 
>wasn't about to go to her home to explain/custom detune it to her nephew's 
>specs etc. Whew! Goodbye! Deleted her from my customer database!!
>
>So, fifteen years later I get a call for a tuning. I go out, a pleasant 
>lady directs me to a very flat, very out of tune console, I explain about 
>pitch raising, and proceed to get to work. Somewhere along the line she 
>mentions that I had tuned a different piano for her long ago, so she 
>remembered to call me when she got another piano. I gradually started 
>recalling that I had been to this address before, and she did look a bit 
>familiar.
>Uh-oh, I thought.
>But she was very pleasant, and no alcohol or tobacco was obvious.
>I think maybe the revolution in psycho-pharmacology  had something to do 
>with the improvement in the situation.
>
>Patrick Draine

I can beat that one, maybe... Low-end console, brought up about 1/4 tone 
(25c). Pitch-raised and tuned.
She called up saying it was flat.  I went back, it was at pitch +/- 
negligible amounts.
It did not match her tape recorder...   speed?   of what??   the 
tape???    you must be kidding !!!!

And then there was THIS, VIOLINIST...
No offense, Susan; but string players are the worst. After all, THEY have 
the perfect ears. I was tending to a
few notes (action) on a piano in a restaurant just before the 'apparel 
fashion show brunch'. A violinist came over and
"asked for an A".   W w W w W w W w. was the beat setup between the piano A 
and her A.  She was aghast!
HOW could the piano be that far off??!   MY tuner is So & So...    I 
checked it with my fork...it was darn close, (I said nothing)...
I knew so&so, but I knew better than to think he was tuning at about A444, 
maybe stretching the last octave too much but other than that, he did 
pretty good.

This just goes to show that people's perspective is relative to their 
concept of normalcy, which has no bearing
on it's closeness to the conscious stream.







Regards,

Jon Page,   piano technician
Harwich Port, Cape Cod, Mass.
mailto:jonpage@attbi.com
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