When is it enough?

[Avery Todd]

Hi Karen,

   In answer to your question, in the particular situation you describe,
what you accomplished was obviously enough. For "that" customer. Perhaps
you could have asked her to return the temperature to where it was? Just
until you finished the tuning? I've had the same thing happen with
air-conditioning. Frustrating. Especially if it's hot and you WANT the
air. :-)
   Not exactly related to your question, but as a former Journal technical
editor said in a series of articles, on many pianos you can reach a "point
of diminishing returns". At that point, no matter how much longer you try,
you're not going to really improve it any more. I understand where you're
coming from.
   However, the most important advice I can give you is to increase your
speed. I was fortunate in my early learning stage, to get work at a busy
Baldwin dealer where there were always pianos which needed tuning. And a
LOT of them needed a pitch raise or lowering job on them. I could tune as
many and as frequently, as I wanted because at that time, I was working
for free in return for some training. And a dealership is one of the best
places to gain experience tuning.
   A pitch raise is a time when you can really work on forcing yourself
to move faster, because you don't "have" to be real accurate the first
time through. As you continue to do that, you'll get to where you are
more and more accurate, even when pushing yourself to move quickly.
   As you get more and more experience doing this, you'll find that in
most situations, you can get in and out in an hour or so. Some, I think,
can do it even faster. Every time you have to do a pitch raise, practice
pushing yourself to move faster. With time, it'll come if you work on it.
   Who was it who used to demonstrate a 5-minute pitch raise of an entire
piano? Steve Fairchild?
   Hope this at least gave you some food for thought.

Avery

>I tuned a Kohler and Campbell upright yesterday.  I had a time limit of how
>long I could stay, about 2 hrs and 15 minutes.  So I set about to do the best
>I could the fastest I could.  (I tend to be the pokey type tuner).  It hadn't
>been tuned for several years, but the pins were tight and it seemed to be
>going well.  Until:  the lady of the house decided she was cold upstairs
>(piano is in lower level of a split) and she cranked the heat up.  The warm
>air proceeds to blow all over the 3/4s tuned piano.  By the time I got
>finished and started checking my work with my accutuner, it had already sunk
>flat again.  I was almost out of time and couldn't go through the whole
>keyboard again so I tweaked the ones that I could and pronounced it "good
>enough".
>
>Not sure how I should feel about that and am looking for advice on when
>"enough is enough".  The customer thought it sounded fine, but I left feeling
>as if I hadn't done my best.
>
>Waiting for input,
>
>Karen Johnson
>ptg associate
>Rochester, MN