Here comes the pitch

[Ron Nossaman]

Mid morning, I tuned (at) a Wurlitzer spinet, with a half-to 
three quarter semitone pitch raise. No surprise there, but I 
got to looking at the printing on the keys inside and noted 
the last two times it was tuned. On 9/27/97, it was "tuned @ 
1/8 low", it said. I wondered why such a moderate pitch raise 
wasn't done with the tuning. Then on 10/21/2000, it was "R to 
A435", according to the next key. Again, why wasn't it brought 
up to pitch? I looked it over, and found no indication that it 
wasn't structurally sound enough to bring up, so I did, and 
tuned (at) it at pitch.

A stop on the way back for lunch, to look over a Kimball 
console they wanted to sell, found a piano in not bad shape, 
and over a semitone low. Again, the keys indicated that the 
same guy had tuned it in 1998, and left it over a half 
semitone low.

I find this guy's name in low pitched pianos all around, and 
he seems pathologically reluctant to pull anything at all up 
to pitch. I don't get it. A piano that got 50 cents low 
naturally is so uneven that it won't tune in one pass at any 
pitch  even if the center is left at it's approximate pitch, 
so why not make two full passes and pull the bloody thing up 
where it at least has a chance of ending up where it's 
supposed to be? The owners of these two pianos paid this guy 
to tune their pianos and he didn't even make an attempt. Many 
times, I've explained the need for a big pitch raise to an 
incredulous first time customer who can't understand the need 
because the piano was just tuned a year or two ago. "Why 
didn't the last tuner do that"?  Why indeed?

Off to tune one of my redesigns. This ought to feel like a 
vacation.

Ron N