Sunday ramblings

[David Andersen]

Hey, fellow artisans------

Now I know, a little bit, what it's like to live where the humidity  
changes constantly; we're in a literally unprecedented stretch of  
dryness here in Southern California, and I'm having to do 2 passes on  
almost every piano I tune, even the super-stable bi-weekly or monthly  
ones. Yow. It's a lotta woik. But a lot of cashola; I charge $50 for  
an "easy" pitch raise---between 2 and 4 cents below pitch, the high  
treble on or close to pitch---and $75 for anything further down than  
that.

It's fascinating; I find that, even in pianos that I've tuned  
constantly for years, the VSP---the Virgil Smith Phenomenon---
when the pitch of a single unison string will change to some degree  
when the other two strings are brought into tune with it---gets more  
intense, and sometimes in a slightly different pattern, when the  
board and bridges have been subjected
to, in our case, a consistently 20-25 point lower RH average for the  
last 6-8 months.  Why is that, O spatial and mechanical genii? 
Nossaman? Overs?

David Andersen