Tuning Time

[Eugenia Carter]

Terry,

Could it be that you are spending too much time on one aspect, like
temperament, and attempting to set an almost perfect, thought possibly
unachievable, one? Or maybe you're spending too much time trying to set
clean unisons on strings that all three have different false beats?

Some pianos can not be tuned as well as others. That is no reflection on the
capability of the tuner; it is just a fact of life about some pianos.

When working on some known lesser quality pianos that you know in advance is
going to be problematic, why don't you set some time limits for yourself
like "I will set the temperament in xxx minutes." Period. When you've fussed
and quarreled with it for that amount of time, say, "OK enough, time to move
on to laying this temperament, good or bad, throughout the piano." Then do
it. Same rationale applies to the unisons. Start with the amount of time
you're spending now; set a new and smaller time frame for the next one, and
do it. Keep lessening the amount of time until you reach the time limit you
feel is the right amount of to spend tuning that kind of piano. Like the
piano teacher says, it only takes practice. :-)

Just make sure you leave the piano better than you found it. With some
pianos, just better unisons will achieve that goal. <g>

Gina

PS Good luck with your debut.


----- Original Message -----
From: Farrell <mfarrel2@tampabay.rr.com>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2000 5:55 PM
Subject: Tuning Time


> I'm having trouble with spending too much time tuning bad pianos. When I
> tune my piano or some other good quality/condition piano, I can do a two
> pass tuning with touch-up in 1¼ to 1½ hours (I consider even a 30 year old
> Yamaha vertical as a good piano - compared to most of the worn-out poor
> quality things I tune). When I tune the typical 1932 Wurlitzer grand
> (original condition) or the 1958 Lester spinet or, even better, the 1965
> Aeolian spinet it commonly takes me two hours to make these things sound
> less lousy than they did when I got there. I know you can only do so much
> with old/worn-out/low quality pianos, but why can't I do a lousy job on
> these in the same amount of time it takes me to do a good job on a decent
> piano. I wouldn't worry about this much if 95%+ of the pianos I tune were
> not of the old/worn-out/low quality type.
>
> Terry Farrell
> Piano Tuning & Service
> Tampa, Florida
> mfarrel2@tampabay.rr.com
>