[pianotech] Old can of worms (was Re: tunelab vs verituner)

[Encore Pianos]

I've known Mark for 30 years and he is a really fine tuner and technician.
What makes him such is that, either way, he's really paying close attention
to what is going on and continuing to learn. To support his comment about
voicing, I simply do not see how one can become a good voicer without highly
developed aural sensitivities to the tone of the piano, because voicing and
tuning are separate but intertwined, and the ability to listen to the
instrument is key.

 

Will Truitt.  

 

From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of Mark Dierauf
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 4:00 PM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [pianotech] Old can of worms (was Re: tunelab vs verituner)

 

Bill -

While it is no doubt true that a motivated EDT user lacking aural skills can
often do as well or better than a decent (let alone a careless and/or poorly
trained aural tuner), I think that there's another good reason to continue
to encourage aural tuning, which is that it teaches critical listening
skills that are necessary for other work besides tuning. In the film Note by
Note one of the Steinway factory workers talked about how only aural tuning
was acceptable to bring out the musical qualities in a piano. Mind you, he
was just chipping a freshly strung piano and I thought at first that this
was ridiculous! He should definitely be using an EDT, at least at this stage
for efficiency. But it later occurred to me that this chipper might well
move up to become a tuner and eventually a voicer, and all that carefully
listening along the way would really help to prepare him for that. When he
finally gets to the selection room - that's when he should use an ETD!

That being said, I think that aural-only tuners are missing out on a lot by
eschewing EDT's. In my own case, moving to an ETD really helped me to
improve my stability and also encouraged me to try different styles of
octave tuning. In fact, it taught me a lot about aural tuning. It also
removed some of the drudgery of aural-only tuning (allowing for extra time
spent on other aspects of service). With an ETD, aural checks need only be
performed once and then the display noted before and after stability tests
(hard blows, pin-wiggling, or whatever). If further adjustment is needed one
need only refer to the display instead of the time consuming checks. Pitch
corrections are much faster, or at least less fatiguing, and when one can
appreciates how easily pitch is affected with even modest changes in string
tension elsewhere then one is more likely  to compensate somehow to produce
better tunings. I routinely float pitch  up to at least 442 in non-critical
situations. If most of the piano is there already I don't think it makes
much sense to do otherwise except by request or necessity. Here again the
ETD allows me to quickly evaluate the pitch across the entire keyboard to
decide the quickest, most stable path to an in-tune piano.

- Mark


On 5/10/2012 8:15 AM, Bill Fritz wrote:

With the advent of the ETD, many Piano Techs without the "RPT" title, with
some experience & the ETD, can out tune the "Craftsman" of old.  And yet the
PTG keeps pushing this old focus.

Best Regards...   Bill Fritz, St Louis





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