first gigs!

[Charles Neuman]

I had my first two "real" customers recently (i.e. paying customers who I
didn't know). I learned a few things:

1) Both customers wanted me to be done after about 1.5 hours. It took me 2
hours to tune one piano and to fix a slow key. On the other piano, it took
me 2.5 hours to do a 120 cent pitch raise and a fine tuning. So in the
future I think I'll warn ahead of time how much time I need.

2) Since I left in a hurry, each customer got a free mute in the bottom of
their piano. From now on, I'm tying two mutes together with string.

3) It's all about the unisons.

4) About that 120 cent pitch raise: As I was closing up the piano, I
noticed heat from the electric baseboard heater right behind the piano.
What's going to happen in the summer? Will the piano be 120 cents sharp?
The fact is, the piano hadn't been tuned for 7 years, so much of the 120
cents might be from that. I wonder how much is from the dry heat, though.
The piano was surprisingly in tune with itself for not being tuned in 7
years.  Kimball spinet. Not so bad. There was a little rust on the
strings, but I used a tiny amount of CLP and also dropped pitch before
raising. No broken strings.

5) Using Tunelab for the pitch raise: You need to set your tuning curve
before doing the pitch raise. But measuring inharmonicity is not accurate
when a note is 120 cents flat as the harmonic structure is different than
it will be when the note is in tune. So, you can rough tune the notes
you'll meausure. Problem: You don't have a tuning curve yet, so how do you
tune them? The Tunelab manual suggests using a generic tuning curve to
rough tune the notes you'll use to measure inharmonicity. Since I haven't
made a generic tuning curve yet, what I did was just took the measurements
as the notes were (but matching up the piano's C# with Tunelab's C). Then
after the pitch raise, I measured inharmonicity again and made a new
tuning curve for the fine tuning. It worked out well. The fine tuning
didn't require too much change, expect maybe in the top octave. But
everything else was amazingly close.

6) It's hard work. But then you get paid! :)

Charles Neuman
PTG Assoc, Long Island