>When whole sections of the piano are uniformly out of tune, I can easily >account for that, but when a section has differences of up to 25 cents on >adjacent notes, I can only attribute that to a "tooner" who had no idea what >he was doing. Am I right? I decided it was prudent not to express my >thoughts to the client. >Clyde Hollinger Oh he had an idea what he was doing all right, it just may not correspond to anyone else's idea of what he should have done. I run into this kind of thing all the time, and the symptoms differ according to who did the last tuning. The last guy may have been a lousy tuner, or a "temperamental" genius. It ultimately doesn't make a bit of difference. I figure that, if they liked the work, and the guy does work in that area, they would have called him back. Or if they can't tell any difference, good, bad, or otherwise, the result is the same. They called you. Mentioning it to the client wouldn't fix anything, so there's little point to that. Trying to reconstruct what was in the last tuner's mind when the tuning was done is really pretty pointless too, for at least a couple of reasons. You don't know his skill level. You don't know his choice of intended temperament. Would you know an Inverted Katchenzimmer Variant if you heard one? Would anyone else? If you were intimately familiar with every variant of every known or suspected historical temperament, would you be able to determine if the temperament you see before you was applied to the piano by intent, or by random incompetence? With a little creativity and a point to try to make, about any feeble tuning attempt can be given an official sounding name. Then again, maybe what's left of the last tuning wasn't what the tuner put there at all. Does the son own a tuning hammer? If not, even then, someone during the last year might have been rash and foolish enough to have turned on either the heat or air conditioning and got all those little air, water, iron, steel, and wood molecules a-dancing at different rates. After that, heck, it's anyone's ball game. Ron N
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