Good job Rob! You're welcome! Keep up the good work! You're doing great! See what I meant when I said it will sound better? The longer one spends on a pitch raise, the harder it is over all on your ears. They become pickier and pickier and pickier to the point where you have to take a break and literally walk away to rest them. Or, you should anyway at that point. The pickier one becomes during that phase, the slower you tend to go. Why? Because you're trying to do to good of a job on the first pass on a major pitch raise. However, if you raise it to pitch and GET IT THERE like you did, it comes out surprisingly better than the 1 hour or longer pitch raise as you duly noted. When I was about 18-20 years old or so, and still working for Jerry Peterson who was one of my 3 mentor's, (Harry Buyce RPT, Jerry Peterson RPT and my dad George W. Groot RPT) the worst piano I have ever run across pitch wise, was this. C-4 was 7 keys flat of pitch, counting every single key including sharps. = F-3.. It was an old upright that we figured had never ever, been tuned. I've never encountered one that far off from pitch since. I did run into one that was about G-3 after that but, never again one as bad as this one. Anyway, the piano was in Peterson's shop. He timed me. I raised it up to pitch in one pass in 6 minutes to A/440 with Peterson standing there saying, "you can do it, you can do it, you can do it! GO GO GO!" Almost yelling it! I still smile when I think of that old fart and his crotchety attitude. He was one heck of a great guy and a wonderful teacher. Keep on striving for that speed. You will be faster than a bullet before you know it. In those days, we tuned strictly by ear. The old Strobe was pretty useless. Guess what? We lubed the pressure bar with the now dreaded WD-40. (Yes, I quit using it a long time ago) Believe it not but, I didn't even break a string! Jer From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Rob McCall Sent: Saturday, December 12, 2009 9:51 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] pitch raise I haven't done very many pitch raises because I'm still fairly new, but I took some advice I received from Jer "Speedy" G about speed and applied it to my pitch raises. I use an ETD (SAT IV) but I don't use the overpull function (primarily because I haven't learned how to use it yet!) but I found that I haven't needed it much. Here's the situation behind my first "rapid" pitch raise. My 12 year old daughter won first place in a songwriting competition and was to play that evening at a district-wide event. They said they had a fairly new piano, the school was only two years old, and the piano sounded fine. Wanting to make sure my daughter sounded the best she could, I decided to stop by the school that afternoon just to check it out. I just "happened" to have my tuning kit with me, figuring maybe a unison or two might need some touching up. What I found was a 2007 Yamaha P22 that hadn't been tuned since new. It was 40-70 cents flat and not a single unison sounded good. I had less than 3 hours before the show started. Since this was to make my own child look wonderful, :-) and the school wasn't going to pay, I volunteered to donate a tuning to the school. I loaded in the P22 page on my SAT and starting at A0, I just started pulling up pitches and unisons as I went, using a single mute. On the trichords, I'd mute the C and R strings, tune the L, move the mute 1 string to the right, then match the C to the L, then I'd pull the mute, placing it in the next C and R position, and pitch up the R string so that it sounded close to the L and C strings I'd just tuned. I just moved as fast as I could. Instead of calculating overpull, I just brought each note up to pitch, and made the lights spin (about 2 lights/second) ever so slightly on the sharp side using the SAT. As I got to the last 2 octaves, I tried to get it as close to on pitch since I figured the rest of the piano is fairly close to pitch, I surmised that I didn't need to pull the last one's so high as most of the required tension was pulled up. Bottom to top, it took me 20 minutes! My previous pitch raise took me 90 minutes. And you know what, I was much happier with this one! When I went back to tune, I found most pitches to be within 5 cents or less and I was able to speed through the tuning much faster. So, I went from a 3 hour tuning and pitch raise on my prior piano, to having this one pitch raised and tuned in a total of 1 hour and 45 minutes. I was very pleased. Since then, I've done 3 other pitch raises the same way with very good results. So, while not totally scientific, I found it to be time-saving and productive. And I think my tunings sound better, too. By the way, the piano sounded beautiful to even my discriminating ear that evening. Or maybe it's just because my daughter was playing the piano. Either way, I was smiling! While tuning, I also gave out cards to about 9-10 different parents who were helping to decorate, because they said they needed their pianos tuned, too! Win-win for everyone!! Sorry for the length of my post... but this topic reminded me of my paradigm-shifting event. I'll see if I can post a link to my daughters performance (which included a mic malfunction) and maybe I can get some feedback on the tuning. Or you can just tell this proud parent that his daughter sounded wonderful! :-) Regards, And thanks "Speedy" G. :-) Rob McCall McCall Piano Service, LLC Murrieta, CA rob at mccallpiano.com www.mccallpiano.com 951-698-1875 On Dec 12, 2009, at 16:57 , pianolover 88 wrote: Pretty basic stuff. When pianos are pitch raised, they will typically drop by about 1/3 of the overpull. So if a piano is 100 cents flat, you would want to raise pitch about 33 cents past A440, since it will drop about that much after the PR. I find that bass strings typically drop far less than rest of the piano, and so they don't require as much overpull. Terry Peterson Accurate Piano Service <http://unigeezer.com/> UniGeezer.com "Over 50, and not "2" Tired!" _____ avast! Antivirus <http://www.avast.com> : Outbound message clean. Virus Database (VPS): 091212-1, 12/12/2009 Tested on: 12/12/2009 11:57:44 PM avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2009 ALWIL Software. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091212/27d7f5bf/attachment-0001.htm>
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