[pianotech] DIY tuning

[Gregor _]

The other day I had a customer who tried to tune his old Blüthner grand. It was a desaster. But fortunately no string broke, even when some strings were 20 cents sharp (and others 40 cents flat!).

Remember your own first attempts to tune a piano. How long did it take and how hard seemed that? In hindsight I can´t believe that my first tuning took me more than 8 hours (by ear). But I get reminded to these attempts because I have an "apprentice" now. She is a good friend of mine who wants to learn tuning and some other things about piano repair. I show her how to tune with ETD and by ear and it´s very hard for her. But she plays guitar too and so she is used to tune by beats. Therefore she does a good job with the unisons. She comes one day a week and I allways let her tune a temperament by ear and then she checks with verituner. Very frustating! Then I let her tune unisons. Last week she made a complete pitch raise with verituner and it took her 5 hours. That would I call some kind of success :-)  But it´s a long way to go. I am happy that´s possible nowadays to do an excelent tuning with ETD. But it´s necessary that one knows what he is doing. Customers usually don´t know.

Gregor

Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:15:43 -0500
From: paul at bruesch.net
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: [pianotech] DIY tuning

Going to tune a spinet tomorrow.

Customer says it has "one wire broken, A below middle C..."

Chatted a bit more, then she says "I tried to tune it myself."

Me: "Is that how the string broke?"


Her: "Yes. It didn't look that hard, but I guess it is. I got the tool from my son." (Well good, I was imagining her using a 6" Crescent!)

So I'm curious... how often has anyone come across this? It's a first for me in my not-so-many years of tuning.


Paul Bruesch
Stillwater, MN


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