I can do a single pass tuning in about 50 minutes, a double pass in an hour or less. Ron is dead on the money here. What Ron is talking about here is the precision of a craftsman with no wasted motion, nothing extraneous. It only takes about half a second to hear what you need once you have advanced your procedure to the point that you can function doing this. You have stopped thinking at this point, it goes straight from your ear to your hand.. It becomes a very pure concentration. An excellent way to bring your tuning towards this method is pitch raising. If say it takes you 35 minutes to pitch raise, then set a goal of getting it done in 30 minutes on the next one. After a while drop it down to 25 minutes, then 20, as far down as you can reasonably go. This kind of listening and hand technique will develop as a byproduct. You will become a better and more efficient tuner. Even when I am doing concert tuning, I find that my tunings get less precise when I slow down too much. If I am setting my best temperament, I still find that I get a better one when I race around the temperament 3 times fast than once or twice slowly. Will Truitt -----Original Message----- From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Ron Nossaman Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2010 12:26 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] shorter final tuning time with pitch raises; forearm smash On 11/3/2010 6:06 AM, David Nereson wrote: How you guys are "in and out" in 45 > minutes or an hour is beyond me. > Welp, now everybody knows. > --David Nereson, RPT Hi David, From past observations rather than specific knowledge of what you, personally, are doing, I find that tuners taking well over an hour are all doing the same thing. They listen too long, and tune way too deep into the tone envelope. Tuning into the decay is a waste of time and effort, I think. Pretty much everything you need is in the first half second of the note. You know what you're listening for, know where to listen for it, and know where to go with it when you hear it. That ought to happen nearly instantly, and that's where you start tuning. Listening beyond that is giving away time without helping the tuning. I hit each string from 10-15+ times, but in quick succession as I'm moving the pin. Like the Sundance kid said, "I'm better when I move". There's a little more time between keystrokes for intervals than for unisons, but not much. No pounding necessary, though one "test" whack somewhere at pitch is good insurance. Moderate blows, and lots of them in a short period of time is what works best for me. I make a hack of a racket tuning, for anyone that's heard me, and though I'm not the best tuner out here, My tunings are near the high end of durable. This is a lot easier to do aurally, since your ear picks up the needed information way before the ETD indicator settles down, but I think it's still applicable. Another factor in taking longer to tune a piano that's already close than one that has to be dragged up from down there is called good sense. Well, first, it's contrast. A pitch salvage sounds comparatively WAY better than when you started, but refining an already near usable tuning takes you farther back into the weeds among the questionable perceptions. The immediate gratification from the pitch raise is almost limbic, where that from a nicely refined already decent tuning is more intellectual. Glands, ask around, trump brains pretty regularly, so gratification takes more work in the fine tuning than in the pitch correction. The good sense is justification after the fact. The refined tuning at pitch is going to be more immediately stable than the pitch correction and tuning, until environmental changes wreck both tunings. That, such as it is, is my take. Ron N
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