more on floating pitch

[Ron Nossaman]

Mike Spalding wrote:
> The majority of the piano gets a significant pitch 
> correction in order to match any chosen float pitch.  Therefore, there's 
> no benefit to floating.  Might as well target 440 every time, it won't 
> be any less work, or any less stable, than floating at some other 
> pitch.  

I entirely agree, nor will it wear out the block.


>And no matter what pitch the piano gets tuned to, when the 
> weather shifts the piano will go out of tune with itself, whether its 
> drifting towards A440 or away from A440.  So why not target A=440 every 
> time?
> 
> Mike

I agree again. Target, that is. It won't be a concert quality 
tuning, but it will be considerably closer to the pitch I'm 
being *paid to tune it at* than an 8c float, and quite 
musically acceptable with no more work involved. As John 
Formsma said, there's some stretch guesswork involved, but it 
gets easy and natural pretty quickly - at least aurally. 
Somewhere between 35-60 minutes, depending on a number of 
details, and you're on to the next one. This obviously isn't 
$180 full service buff and massage Chautauqua tent show 
experience stuff, but a church or school with 3-50 pianos 
needing tuned isn't looking for that anyway. The dumb part of 
all this is that the institutional pianos get tuned at the 
very end of the seasons, so very little use is gotten out of 
these tunings, and the pianos sound wretched except for a few 
weeks a year, just before the weather turns.

This is the sort of stuff that makes shop work fun.

Ron N