How many times do you tune?

[Bob Anderson]

I've read quite a few postings now about this now. It reminds me of a
class I attended several years ago by Charlie Huether. He asked "How
many times do you tune a piano?" Everyone gave their ideas, much like on
this list. His idea was that you tune a piano until you are finished,
i.e., until you feel comfortable with taking the check and leaving. It
would seem prudent to evaluate how much tuning you expect to do before
you start and to inform the customer how much you plan to charge. It
really doesn't matter whether you call a procedure a pitch raise or not
from the point of view of how much money you want to earn per unit time. 

BTW, I've heard numerous references to pianos being 38 cents flat, 119
cents flat, 82 cents flat, etc. I'm curious as to what everyone means
when they use that sort of expression. I've never seen a piano that was
at the same pitch level all through the scale(unless it was tuned all
the time, e.g., a concert instrument). Do people measure the flatness of
A4 and use that figure to come up with how flat they say the piano is?
It can be a little misleading if someone is talking about a piano that
may have a pitch variance of over 50 cents throughout the scale.

I've also read some postings indicating that people check all the A's
before an SAT pitch raise to see if different parts of the piano scale
need different amounts of overpulling. I also check all the A's before
pitch raising(or any tuning, for that matter), but I do it for getting a
general impression of the piano before I start tuning, not to make the
pitch correction settings for the SAT pitch raising program. For that
purpose I reset the offset twice per octave. I think I read that in the
SAT manual. In any case I've been doing it that way for a long time. I
wouldn't feel comfortable resetting only once per octave. I may reset
more often if I detect big local variations in pitch. If my next reset
note varies wildly from the last one, I'll at least stop to see if the
pitch is changing in that general area of the piano or if it's just that
one note that is out of sync with the rest. This can happen, and if you
can keep track of it you can do more accurate pitch raises. It doesn't
take very long to reset twice per octave.

Bob Anderson
Tucson, AZ