ADDENDUM: At one point a unison on one piano went out. The had to halt the production and Alan ran out on stage to touch it up. He got a wild spontaneous applause from the live audience when he finished! I tuned for the Grateful Dead once. This was a big outdoor amphitheater, with probably 15,000 spectators, all Deadheads. (probably stoned, since this was in 1980). I had 20 minutes before the concert started. The piano was miked, and I had on ear phones to hear it. What I didn't know at the time was the the audience could also hear my tuning through the speakers. When I got done, I got a big round of applause. The audience probably applauded because they were glad that I was finally done. But maybe they applauded because they recognized the great job I did. I just keep telling myself it was the latter. Wim -----Original Message----- From: Rob & Helen Goodale <rrg at unlv.nevada.edu> To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Sun, Nov 8, 2009 8:51 am Subject: [pianotech] Working on the front lines I tried sending this message several times the last couple of days but my email was having rejection problems. At last I am able to send it. As you read this just pretend that today is Friday evening and it will all make perfect since. Hello all, Alan Meyer , RPT, and myself are on location out of state working at a concert featuring the Five browns. The producers commissioned us to travel to the gig and be the techs for the event. As I sit here typing this the concert has just got underway, (WI-FI is cool huh?) For those who are not familiar the 5 Browns are a group of five brothers & sisters who are proficient to say the least. They are doing a little tour. This is the third time we have worked with them. Tonight's performance is being video recorded for a televised broadcast. It's really quite impressive, the television production crew is huge. This must be costing a fortune. This gig has turned out to be a real challenge. Yesterday we came in to do the initial tuning for the rehearsal. This is an outdoor amphitheater venue that is pretty impressive and home to a lot of major productions. When we arrived we dived right in to tune the two Ds and three Bs already on stage. We quickly learned a hard lesson. The sun was beating down overhead but eventually went down behind the mountain and the temperature quickly dropped at least 20 degrees. Suddenly all the tuning we did was worthless, the pianos sounded terrible. We had to start all over from scratch. The two of us were tuning at the same time which made things challenging enough but it didn't stop there. The production crew was setting up cameras, microphones, moving equipment, and just after we got started two guys arrived in a gas powered cherry picker to work on lights and stage props overhead. Then they decided that they needed to make a hole in the stage floor for a bunch of television cables to go through so now a guy is working with an electric hole cutting drill directly under the piano I was tuning! Hearing anything was nearly impossible but we had no choice because they suddenly informed us that they were going to be recording some of the close-up shots without the audience during rehearsal! Somehow we completed the nearly impossible task just in time. I have to say we actually did a pretty darn good job. After it finally quieted down just before they started we went back and tested our tuning. It was nearly right on, clean unisons and all! I guess that means we must know what we're doing. Today we planned ahead and arrived AFTER the sun went down. The pianos were much more stable and the production crew had most of their stuff in place so it was a bit quieter. Unfortunately they were doing some sound checks and we were still competing with each other. We will be required to go back out on stage in front of the full audience to touch-up the pianos, (5 pianos in the 15 minutes allowed before the cameras start to roll again). If they break a string I don't know what we'll do. They did put us up in some nice accommodations though so I guess we don't have too much to complain about. It all continues tomorrow so we get to do this all over again. Rob Goodale, RPT Alan Meyer, RPT ADDENDUM: At one point a unison on one piano went out. The had to halt the production and Alan ran out on stage to touch it up. He got a wild spontaneous applause from the live audience when he finished! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091108/1e375fb4/attachment-0001.htm>
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