Friends, I do not consider myself a pianist by any definition. But since people always seem to enjoy hearing their piano played after it is tuned, I take a minute or two to do a few little things, mostly stuff I made up that sounds pretty good to people who hear nothing other than their own kids banging out elementary exercises. One of those pieces includes most of the keyboard from F1 to C8. If you like reading personal anecdotes, here's one of mine that's only vaguely related to the above: While I was growing up our family was always short on money. I can only recall twice that a piano tuner came to see what he could do with our wornout old upright, and none of us seven kids had lessons. But we had a lot of fun with that beast playing "Chopsticks" and such, and I used it to compose my first little gospel tune when I was about ten. I, too, never had a piano lesson, until I started college at the age of 24 as a music education major. In my senior year I was required to pass a piano proficiency test before I could do my student teaching. Alas, even though the test was fairly easy, I flunked it. Two weeks later I took it again with the same results. That's when the Music Department powers called me in for a little conference. "Clyde," they said, "we believe you will make a good music teacher, but you've *got* to pass this test! So we've decided we'll have you spend an hour each day with the piano teacher for the next two weeks, working on the test material, and then we'll give you the test one more time." I did the work and passed the test with a C. Whew! (My overall GPA was 3.3.) I taught high school music for seventeen years. Some considered me to be among the best, although I am not going to launch into a self-praise monologue to explain why, My keyboard skills never got much better. I am just all thumbs, so to speak. Although we have a piano, it almost never gets played unless our daughter comes for a visit. But it wouldn't seem right for a piano technician to not even own one, now would it? Regards, Clyde Hollinger, RPT Lititz, PA, USA stars@teleport.com wrote: > What tunes do you use as your 'test' tunes to play when you are finished tuning?
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