In a message dated 6/30/00 7:29:31 PM Central Daylight Time, lesbart1@juno.com (Leslie W Bartlett) writes: << I'll continue to refocus, and go ahead. At least I CAN go through twice in 90 or so minutes- a fact that rather surprised me just a few weeks ago. >> Actually, your time is not bad. This is the amount of time it is generally expected to take to do a good piano tuning. It's just that with decades of experience, not just a few years, you'll be able to do what most people can do in half the time. Recently, I injured my right shoulder. It prevented me from lifting my arm. My forearm and hand were OK but I still didn't have full use of my right arm and still don't at the present. I had to even take a few days off without working at all. I tried to use my left hand for everything I could in order to give my right hand a break. Simple things like buttering bread made me realize how much the right hand is adapted to skilled tasks and the left hand is subordinate. When I tried to butter the bread, I handled the knife as a five year old child would. Brushing my teeth, combing my hair, every usual task was very difficult. There was no way I could write with a pen, let alone operate a tuning hammer. I know that there are people who can tune ambidextrously, and I admire that skill very much. I only wish I could but there is no way that I could ever have the patience to try to get my left hand to learn what my right knows how to do so well and efficiently. I know I have written this before. The reason a skilled tuner can rough tune a whole piano in about 15 minutes is that each note will come into tune for him or her with only one or two strokes of the tuning hammer. If you can learn to control the hammer so that when you are doing your rough tuning, each string comes into tune for you with but a few strokes, it simply won't take but 15-20 minutes to do a rough tuning. When you are ready to do the fine tuning, there will be many strings that you do not have to tune, therefore, they take no appreciable time. If your same technique is applied to the strings which still need correction, you get them perfect with but a few strokes of the tuning hammer, your fine tuning won't take much time either. I would think that you probably have enough skill already to get your double pass tuning down to an hour if you really want to. Unfortunately, the situation you encountered is not unusual. It can even happen with very good quality, frequently tuned pianos when Relative Humidity changes have been extreme but the piano is for public use and A-440 is what is required and so is a stable tuning. It's not hard to be able to treat every situation with high standards once you really have your techniques under you belt. I understand exactly what you were going through and how to you, this piano just wouldn't hold and that it was someone else's fault, not your lack of knowledge or skill. But I'm afraid that if someone else with more experience had been at the same situation or another one like it, it would have presented no real challenge, only a higher fee for having to do more work, or maybe even just accepted as being within the normal range of tuning difficulty. The instability you encountered is common. I would actually anticipate and be prepared to deal with the treble and high treble being progressively flatter when the goal is to have beautifully stretched octaves. If those octaves didn't require a little work to get them where they should be and stable, I sometimes wonder why I am being asked to tune this piano. Frankly, I expect the worst every time and am so often surprised to find that it isn't so bad or at least I had a way of getting around the problem quickly. It makes the whole day easier for me. In some cases, the treble and/or high treble of a piano are so unstable that a third pass is necessary in these sections only. If, after your first rough pass, your treble or high treble are still mostly flat, simply do the quickest run through of octave tuning, leaving beats between them, in whole steps, if you like, pull in the unisons, give them all a final and firm test blow and start over. That whole operation would have taken maybe 5 minutes. Now, however, you have a stretch of the piano which you can really tune easily and expect some good stability and it shouldn't take much longer than the rough tuning did. This is an illustration of the late Gearge Defebaugh's slogan, "You can tune a piano faster and better twice than you can fight with it once". I'd suggest as others have that when you get to the Convention, you first of all observe some others working. Then, if you can, get a very experienced person to work with you. If there is tutoring available, go that route but otherwise, if you ask around, you will be able to find somebody to work with you somewhere. What you should try to work on is this "one stroke tuning" idea. Just do some unisons first, then temperament and octaves. See how good you can get things with only 1-3 strokes of the tuning hammer, then move on. That is how speed and accuracy are developed. Why not use Golf and Tiger Woods as an analogy? He won that recent event by a large margin and set an extraordinary record. He did it by being the player with the fewest strokes, obviously. But each one of those strokes was superbly executed. I heard it said that he had worked very hard for it. I'll bet he spent extraordinary hours practicing his strokes until they had unprecedented power and accuracy. You have to get away from the idea that you *turn* the tuning pin when tuning. It is best *manipulated* with a jarring kind of motion in most normal circumstances. You learn to strike gently or firmly as needed. Each piano is different but you get a feel for the piano quickly, within a few strokes. Think about what Steve Fairchild must have done in order to get the piano rough tuned in less than 5 minutes. His must have really been a one stroke per pin operation. But he had practiced, and he had a very good feel for the piano he was working with, kept his eye on the next pin to be struck and kept moving. So, that's how you do it, Les. I hope you come back from the Convention with a full 15 minutes shaved off your 90 minute time to do a 2-pass tuning. If you have the desire, you will be able to knock it down to about an hour by this time next year. Good Luck, Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin P.S. Moving a piano is something you will NEVER see me doing! (I only point where I want it put).
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