Pitch Raise

[Dean May]

Hi Duaine,

Quick and dirty is what it sounds like. You go through one pass just as
fast as you can, 15-20 minutes. Some go faster. You do it by sacrificing
accuracy, obviously. As you get experienced at it, when you come back
for the second pass you find a lot of notes pretty close and needing
only minor tweaking.

I personally think "speed tuning" is excellent training. It forces you
to focus on the beats that really count and you learn to filter out
trash noise. When someone is first starting out tuning it is easy to get
bogged down in hearing all kinds of noises. You end up spending 4 hours
on one tuning and wearing yourself out totally. My philosophy is to
force yourself to move on to the next note. You gotta figure that first
starting out it will sound bad whether you spend 1 hour or 4 hours. If
you are going to work at it for 4 hours I think the tuning will be
better with 4 one hour passes than one 4 hour pass.  You'll learn more,
too. 

Learning to minimize wasted motion is a real key to speed training. Time
spent moving mutes, hammer, fingers, etc is wasted time. An extra 4
seconds on a pin is an extra 15 minutes of tuning time. Learn to do it
quickly and efficiently. 

Ear plugs are also a must for speed training. They filter out extraneous
noises, all the incoherent white noise in a room. They also lop off the
upper harmonics of the note, which is where a lot of false beats come
from, but they allow the lower harmonics through, the ones you need to
hear. You don't need those upper harmonic frequencies until you get into
octave eight, and there you just pull the plugs out a little bit so more
of them can get through. Ear plugs allow you to focus on the beats you
need to hear and eliminate distracting noise. Plus your ears aren't
totally beat up after 4-6 hours of tuning. Use 'em. Do your final checks
without them in and you'll be amazed at how great the piano sounds. I
use the cheap silicone variety at any drug store. 

For Marshall, specifically, I am sure there are already good techniques
out there that sight impaired tuners use for keeping track of what
tuning pin they are on. Perhaps you could use 8 short lengths of tubing
that will slip over the tuning pins. The first thing you could do is
mark the location of all the A's with a piece of tubing. Then you
wouldn't have to go all the way to one of the breaks to count back to
your position if you get lost.

Recently I was called out to tune for a jazz concert. The organizer was
a friend of mine and he forgot to schedule in advance. By the time I got
there the musicians and crowd was starting to trickle in. By the time I
was done the room was crowded and noisy. The piano was awful when I
started. I packed in the earplugs and hammered the keys so I could hear
over the crowd. I put a 20 minute tuning on it using RCT and got out of
there. A week later I went back for a real tuning and I was amazed at
how good it sounded. 

Dean
Dean May             cell 812.239.3359
PianoRebuilders.com   812.235.5272
Terre Haute IN  47802


-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces@ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces@ptg.org] On
Behalf Of Hechler Family
Sent: Saturday, January 07, 2006 5:31 PM
To: Pianotech
Subject: Re: Pitch Raise

Gary,

I still have never caught on to the two pass theory. I still do one pass
and let the customer know that, for it to be better, don't wait so long
between tunings.

So please expand on your definition of a "quick and dirty" pass.
(meaning actually what do you do - which I probably will try since most
of my customers have old uprights and players.

Thanks you,
Duaine