Here comes the pitch

[Barbara Richmond]

Hey, I thought that guy lived in Peoria!  :-)

Barbara Richmond, RPT
near Peoria, Illinois


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Nossaman" <rnossaman at cox.net>
To: "Pianotech List" <pianotech at ptg.org>
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 2:54 PM
Subject: Here comes the pitch


> 
> 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