Barb Barasa rote, 4/30/96: <<Do you guys (that includes Barbara and Mary) get into this spiel with every customer, or only select ones? I do almost entirely in-the-home tunings. When they call and I ask them how long it's been since the piano was tuned, and they can't remember how many years, it kind of makes me suspect that they are reluctant to part with the money for a tuning and that it would be ludicrous to suggest that they invest in regulating and voicing. Or am I shooting myself in the foot by making this assumption??>> There are two decisions to be made here, if and whose. "If" is whether or not we make it our calling to leave the little box of tuning and go out into the much larger realm of piano sound and feel. It's a personal decision, and can be a little scary. (Venturing into that realm means more often than not putting oureslves between the pianist and her/his piano. If she/he is any good the pianist can draw quite a bit out of the piano, but if the piano is currentl unable to deliver, we'll have to step in between musician and instrument make it able to deliver. With few other instruments are the musicians so helpless. As a result there's a lot of neurotic energy in this breach wher we're called to work.) Once we've decided "if", we're filled with joy at a fine sounding piano and we cry at a piano in sad condition. But whether "we get into this spiel with every customer" is more a matter of "whose", that is whose piano we'll do this work on. Once again, I'd no sooner sell catfood to a dog or dogfood to a cat , than I'd sell music lessons to a deaf person. But If I had a new bean dip which I wanted to sell, I'd go to a supermarket and set up a card table over by the deli section where I could cheerfully dispense free samples on crackers or celery sticks. If I wanted to sell soundandfeel service, I would let the piano do the talking. "Only select ones?" Yes. We know how we feel about a good sound and playing piano. What we have to do is find that quality in the piano owners. When we find that nature, that's the side of the pianist we talk to. "Do you like this harsh, clangy sound? Look at those flat hammers." "Difficulty controlling the way sound comes out of the piano? Look at how little resistence the action puts up against your musculature." "Hear the nasal quality on that note which keeps it from blending with its neighbors? Listen to the RH string as the hammer hits it, and now listen to that string when I lift the hammer up and pluck the string." "Having a hard time getting 'Moolight Sonata' to work on this piano? How 'bout those flat knuckles and that fat let-off." Of course that's alot of talking on my part, but I'm only putting in words what the piano has been saying to the owner all along, and will continue to say to her/him after I've left. In most cases, a simple demonstration of the remedy takes far less time than my explanation (and the owner's spell of glazed eyes.) If there's something we shouldnt lose sight of in all this, it's that the transaction should not be between the technician who needs to sell a few extra hours work to this new customer and the customer who won't even open their ears to a pitch without first a positive balance in their checkbook. This transaction should be between a piano techician and pianist, both of whom know what a good piano can and should be like, how far from that potential this piano is, and how much each of them wants this piano to reach that potential. Richard Adkins rote, 4/30/96: <<Alot of piano teachers don't seem to want to part with their hard earned money....even though they are getting $20 a pop....>> This is a tough, and a basic injustice with which I've always been uneasy, that our hourly rate is usually double that of the teachers we're taking care of. But in fact, it's really not all that bad. We see their pianos maybe once, twice a year. They see their students once a week. Come 12/31, we've made roughly the same amount of money. Barb rote: <<I would love to practice my extremely limited voicing skills on old Cable spinets instead of jumping right into a Steinway grand, but are these folks really going to go for this??>> Who remembers Steve Jellen, long-time PTG luminary from CT who passed away in 8/77? His sterling advice about developing the ear for piano sound was "spend two or three minutes with the voicing on each piano at the end of its tuning. There's always something you can improve about the piano. With that regular excercize, you'll be ready for the day you install a nice set of hammers on a nice grand." Two or three minutes is not enough time to even think of charging the customer for, but the education it gives you is priceless. We should also be prepared to find those customers who begrudge the cost of a tuning, not because they don't like music or pianos, but because they are weary of the pack of tuners who come through and tune but can't leave the piano sounding good. Here again it should be made clear to any customer with such expectations, what can be done with a few free (both senses of the word) minutes, and what will cost. But it never ceases to amaze me what can be accomplished in a few "free" minutes, and the priceless value which that can have to a customer who has never had that kind of service before. Bill Ballard RPT "May you work on interesting pianos." NH Chapter, PTG Ancient Chinese Proverb
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