Another Tough Tuning Environment (2 tuners in same room)

[Jim Johnson]

That reminds me of an experience I had a number of years ago tuning college 
practice room pianos.  I finished a tuning at the same time that my 
assistant finished his and we had one piano left to do.  We were both tired 
and neither one of wanted to do it, so we compromised.   I tuned the 
temperment, then I tuned to the top of the piano while he tuned to the 
bottom, getting the piano done in half the time.  We are both aural tuners 
so you can imagine the challenge.  It was actually fun and the piano turned 
out to be very well tuned.  However, once is enough--I've never repeated the 
exercise.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Nossaman" <rnossaman at cox.net>
To: "Pianotech List" <pianotech at ptg.org>
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 9:52 PM
Subject: Re: Another Tough Tuning Environment


>
>> Well, I thought I would include another short sound clip from a tough 
>> tuning location.
>>
>> NAMM show is this week!
>>
>> Don Mannino
>
>
> Ah, memories! A bunch of years back, we had a local "pianorama" sort of 
> thing. I don't recall what it was actually called, but it aspired to 
> somewhat greater class, and the participation of all the local dealers and 
> factory representatives of the piano brands they dealt. The venue was a 
> large hall with a killer echo and at least a half dozen folks tuning at 
> any given time, or trying to, around not only each other, but the usual 
> setup and shouted conversational noise we've all learned to love. I had 
> already tuned six or seven for a couple of local dealers, and was more 
> brain dead than usual, when I stopped by the Kawai booth to give Ray 
> Chandler a hard time (which seemed like a worthy end in itself, at the 
> time). He was looking at tuning a fair number of pianos in an impossible 
> situation, and "generously" offered to hire me to tune a couple of his for 
> him. Hey - never mind if the mule goes blind, just load the wagon. Sure, 
> why not? My approach in these situations is to make marginally more noise 
> tuning than the sum total of everyone else in the vicinity (which I'm told 
> I can do well enough), and it seems to work as well as anything else I 
> could do as an aural tooner. I whacked one out, and was coming down from 
> the top, tuning unisons (strip mute), on the second when I realized that 
> Ray was coming up from the middle and we were converging on the killer 
> octave of two pianos from different directions. Ray was in another place 
> by then - the tuner's fugue state, and hadn't seemed to have noticed this, 
> so I stopped tuning a unison short and waited... When he got to where I 
> had set the trap, I struck the note as he was in the middle of tuning the 
> same note. It was cruel, I know, like an ice cube down your shorts, but I 
> was pretty far gone by then and entirely too desperate for entertainment 
> for decent considerations of propriety. It's the only defense I have. Take 
> it or leave it. In any case, the result was as gratifying as anything I 
> could have hoped for. He stood up straight suddenly (can't imagine why 
> someone would stand to tune when he could sit - a mystery), looked at me, 
> and said "You waited for me!".
>
> He forgave me, I think, seeing the humor in the situation. But that was 
> years before I told the story to the world. I guess I'll have to see how 
> it goes from here...
>
> Ron N
>
>