Verituner

[Andrew & Rebeca Anderson]

Donning flame suit now: ;-)
If you use an ETD to set the bearings (like I do) aren't you putting your 
tooner ear at risk too?  I do use the ETD to track what is going on as I 
spread out from the middle, but since I am using a stone-age ETD I trust my 
ear and correct the ETD settings constantly.  Where I use it most is 
extreme treble where I and a lot of aural tuners have trouble hearing the 
really short beats.

If your ETD doesn't deal with stretch as needed by the piano, you will 
encounter some really funny things happening in little pianos.  In a spinet 
you can expect to come close to stretching the note on either side of 
A4.  That is why a set of tuning forks for the octave temperament (they 
sell them at Schaff) does not work for all pianos.  Of-course checking the 
Major Thirds (I do them as triads) will catch this problem, but then you 
are tuning twice.  When you are tuning for institutions where the bell 
rings all too soon and the classroom is suddenly flooded with curious 
students, a good ETD is very helpful.

I prepped a piano for a Liszt recital last week and it was a pitch-raise 
with a nasty killer octave.  Next time I'll come prepared to level strings 
and drift the wires around pins on the bridge.  Anyhow, I did the pitch 
raise with ear-plugs in and then spent a lot of time (I had the whole place 
to myself and no time constraints) tuning aurally with the tuner over there 
automatically following me around (an amusing distraction).  For me, tuning 
aurally is a great pleasure not always afforded by the commercial 
circumstances I find myself in.  A week later, lots of practise, and ten 
degrees warmer I volunteered to fix four unisons the day of the 
concert.  That wasn't a call-back, when I asked the artist if it might need 
a little touch-up by now he wasn't certain but mentioned he was 
uncomfortable with something in D flat major in the bass.  Unless you are 
tuning for a tuner you aren't likely to get a callback.  I've tuned after 
some atrocious tunings (not here in Las Cruces fellow chapter members ;-) 
).  The customer only noticed that the previous tuning was bad by how 
wonderful my tuning was by comparison.

Ducking into my foxhole now, ;-)
Andrew
Las Cruces, NM