stability of pitch raises (Ron's question)

[Farrell]

> I don't always charge for a pitch adjustment (guess that means I'm not
> invited to comment here), but I am not offended by the practice of other
> techs who charge for pitch raises in order to "punish" the customer
because
> it's been too long since the last tuning.

And I trust you are aware that many techs that do charge extra for a pitch
raise do so not to "punish" a piano owner, but rather because raising the
pitch of a piano and then tuning requires more work than tuning an
up-to-pitch piano, and therefore more time. And time is money. I don't care
if someone last tuned their piano two years ago or 102 years ago. If it is
50 cents flat I will charge them $40 for a pitch raise plus my regular
tuning fee. No punishment involved.

Terry Farrell

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kent Swafford" <kswafford@earthlink.net>
To: "pianotech list" <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 02, 2001 5:14 PM
Subject: Re: stability of pitch raises (Ron's question)


> On 9/2/01 1:33 PM, "Ron Nossaman" <RNossaman@KSCABLE.com> wrote:
>
> > How can one compute charges on something they can't define?
>
> Last I heard, tuning fees are arbitrary, and don't necessarily reflect the
> actual work needed to get a specific piano in tune; why shouldn't pitch
> raise charges be arbitrary as well?
>
> I don't always charge for a pitch adjustment (guess that means I'm not
> invited to comment here), but I am not offended by the practice of other
> techs who charge for pitch raises in order to "punish" the customer
because
> it's been too long since the last tuning.
>
> I have a rather involved method for using CyberTuner to determine the
> overall pitch level of a piano, but I am not offended by the practice of
> other techs who simply measure A4 and compute charges based on the
starting
> pitch of A4. Computing pitch correction charges based on the starting
pitch
> of A4 is a simple and consistent method for quoting a price and getting
> customer $ approval before starting the work.
>
> Determining "how far off pitch the piano is" is a rather different problem
> from that of computing pitch raise charges. Pitch raise mode in RCT has a
> neat feature in that it can automatically measure and store the starting
> pitch of each note. I use this feature for a few seconds on every piano I
> tune to determine the piano's beginning overall pitch by measuring all the
> As and all the Cs of the piano. Of course, often pianos are so uneven
> between sections that they will require a pitch correction pass before
they
> can be tuned to _any_ pitch level. Most often though, the range of pitches
> of the As and Cs will be small enough that the general pitch level of the
> piano can be determined to within reasonable tolerances.
>
> I am tempted to try to answer a question you posed quite some time ago as
to
> why the top octave of a piano needs overpull when doing a pitch
correction.
> The short answer is because when the research was done to develop the
smarts
> to program into the EDTs, the measurements said the top notes did indeed
> drop and so overpull was needed. Keep in mind that the original
instructions
> for using the SAT and RCT pitch correction modes involved chromatically
> tuning A0-C8 pulling in unisons as you go, _and_ the instructions
> specifically said not to set the string, to simply pull the string up to
> where the display stops, then let go. Letting go of the hammer without
> setting the string was a technique for speed that resulted in more drop;
> and even more drop would occur as the other two strings of the unison were
> pulled in aurally to match the first string, since a good portion of the
> drop in a single string appears to come from pulling up the strings in the
> immediate vicinity of that first string. All that said, the behavior of
the
> top half octave during a pitch raise is less predictable than other parts
of
> the piano; some pianos need little overpull in the top half octave.
>
> Kent Swafford
>