<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hi Dennis I dont find there is that much of a difference in tuning a large concert instrument compared to a smaller one in terms of tuning stability.  I find myself being a lot more picky for a 9 foot Steinway then a 6 foot Petrof.... but the basic job of doing a 4 cent pitch change is basically the same. I know many report such the same kind of experience you site below and there is a lot of musing as to why... but this is simply not in my experience.  I can get just about any instrument in very very fine tuning within 2 hours... rarely need more then little over an hour.  In a difficult pitch raise situation... you can actually get the piano usable at pitch in an hour.... ready for those very fine adjustments you site below. If you have an hour for those... well the result should be more then adequate. I also read with interest the report from Juilliard. We recently have run into that classic conflict of the desire to use our concert instruments for practice and other less critical usage and keeping them maintained. Things got way out of control these past couple months and suddenly our CF III and Steinway C got subjected to about 80 hours of hard banging with in a 45 day period.  One student alone had managed to book in 16 hours of rehearsals in one week. It was for her masters exam.  Our exams schedule is just after the major classical music festival here in town which I also have responsibility for. Our students have a concert series for that festival and the venue is just across the street from the school.  I found students using the CF III for warm-ups for their concerts at Grieghallen foaje. The interesting bit here is that the <<concert instrument>> is a C7 in an acoustically very difficult room. There was in other words no justification whatsoever for using the CF III for this.  If anything it would introduce a bit of a detriment to the actual performance.  The result of all this overuse was that there was 2 mm deep grooves that were 7 mm long on average for all hammers... a bit less in the lowest bass. This was on an instrument that had received a full service maintenance  session in March... so all that hammer wear came after then. We are all having a meeting this coming week about the over use.  The basic rules we've always had is that students will get a maximum of 2 hours to use the concert instrument in the week before any important exam. Otherwise the use of the instruments are reserved for concert and recordings, master classes and exams themselves.  Performers are allowed a 45 minute warm-up just prior to any concert time allowing.  Why things fell apart is what we will be meeting about. In the real world... pianists rarely get to have this liberal a situation for concerts. Often enough, if not most often, they have perhaps 10 minutes to get to know the instrument... and then they have to play.  A school is necessarily a bit different with all the pressure exams bring to young anxious students... but still I think its an important part of their education to get used (at least this much) to reality.  Besides... the fact is... no piano will remain a concert instrument for long with the kind of use I mention above. Cheers RicB <blockquote> Hi again- Thanks for the comments.  That's certainly an impressive program at Juilliard....!  I think you emphasized the main issue at stake, which is defending the amount of time we require in the hall to maintain the standard that is expected there.  It's an uncomfortable argument to make when we know that the players are often not getting all the rehearsal time they desire either.  So it goes- but that aside, and back to the pianos,  what I was really thinking about in terms of more time on performance concert grands was not all the regulation and voicing, but rather the fact that I can tune a nice 6' grand with say a 4 cent pitch adjustment in 2 hours or less and confidently know that it is rock solid stable and beautifully tuned as good as possible.  I can not say the same for a concert grand. In fact about the only time I can know for sure that I'll feel that good about the tuning on a concert grand is if there is no adjustment at all.  It's this difference that I was hoping to quantify in more understandable or specific terms.   There is also the real issue on our own part of perhaps sometimes taking the whole experience too personally.  We want to keep the "magic" going.  It's so cool when that happens and is appreciated.  It's simply not possible for "magic" to happen all the time- same with performances, and musicians do understand that. cheers~ dennis. St. Olaf College</blockquote> </body> </html>