---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment TP, You get one of these occasionally, and you hope they never call again. Unlike your customer, the people I get who are so picky usually DON'T play the piano a lick, they just go up and down the keyboard one firmly-struck note at a time, with one ear cocked to the piano. Because they don't play or understand pianos a lick(usually), the problem is not well articulated. Solving problems that actually exist can be difficult enough. Then you get the exasperation of phantom noises. My sympathies! Dave Stahl In a message dated 2/6/04 5:06:14 PM Pacific Standard Time, Topperpiano@aol.com writes: > > Just thought I'd vent on a most perplexing service call today. Last week I > went to do a trouble shooting call for a local dealer. The customer, who is > a very accomplished pianist, had purchased a new very expensive piano. The > customer only spoke very limited English. Other than a few slightly wobbly > unisons there was nothing really wrong with the piano. The piano had been > nicely prepped, was well regulated and voiced evenly. Last week I spent over an > hour with the customer and could not discern one iota of what her complaint > could possibly be. She would play a note several times and say "sound." Then > she would look at me as if to get assurance that I too heard the offending > problem. Some of the notes that she objected to had the slightly off unisons > so I cleaned up the tuning. This did not phase her. Finally I got some > paper, took the fallboard off, pointed out the numbers on the keys and made a > chart and asked her to mark Like, Not Like on each key, hoping to see some > similarity in the likes and not likes. I also mentioned that if we could get > someone who spoke English that it might go better. This week when I returned she > indeed had a friend who spoke much better English. The chart was filled with > remarks like "Not beautiful, more exact, finish sooner, too over, etc. > After mUUUUUch discussion with the friend I discovered that her main complaints > were the undamped high treble notes sustaining, some impact sounds of the > hammer hitting the string in the top octave, and the dampers in the bass not > cutting off rapidly enough on a very hard blow. There was not one problem that > did not fall squarely in the range of normalcy. I spent two hours trying to > explain that there no dampers in the high treble and that the dampers in the > bass were not under performing and I voiced three hammers in the top octave to > see if that would eliminate some offending sound. I left feeling very > unsuccessful with no idea whether or not the customer was appeased. She waived > good-bye to me and had her friend tell me that she would call the store and ask > for me when she needed to have it tuned. ---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/86/41/04/29/attachment.htm ---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment--
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