Verituner

[antares]

Being a master aural tuner and at the same time a master machine tuner, is
pretty cool too.

My wife is a composer and she writes her music with the aid of a Macintosh
computer.
Her former teacher is more 'old fashioned', he still writes music with a
pencil and an eraser.
His handwriting is beautiful.
I do understand about aesthetics, but also about the aesthetics of a well
designed and beautifully accurate machine.

friendly greetings
from

Antares,

Amsterdam, Holland

"where music is, no harm can be"

> From: A440A@AOL.COM
> Reply-To: pianotech@ptg.org
> Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2001 11:32:39 EDT
> To: pianotech@ptg.org
> Subject: Re: Verituner
> 
> Greetings, 
> Ron writes:
>> While I'm a far cry from being an expert tuner, what
>> feeble results I do produce come from my own talents, ears, brains, and
>> hands. They almost certainly aren't the best of all possible tunings
>> under  the circumstances, but the process of creating and constructing these
>> flawed little works is, for me, what makes it tolerable to go out there
>> and  do it day after day.
> 
> Hmm, well,  if aural tuning satisfies an individual's motivational
> needs, there is nothing wrong with doing it that way.  However, in my case,
> even after the best tuning education on the planet and then 16 aural years in
> a very demanding environment, a SAT made me a better tuner after just a very
> short time.  
> In my case, I am not psychologically equipped to tune anything but the
> "best possible tuning under the circumstances",(probably a little
> obsessive/compulsive aspect there!).  I have developed a clientele that pays
> far above the going rate for the security, (recording session are way too expe
> nsive to stop and wait for a note or octave to be fixed), so I have to do
> what produces the best tuning, and I have found that my ears combined with a
> machine is the way to do that.
> If someone wants to make the point that a superior tuning can be had
> with ears alone, as opposed to ears and a machine, I certainly need to hear
> their results before I believe it, and I ain't heard it yet.
> It is interesting that Virgil Smith, (whose work, by any of our
> standards,  represents an ultimate aural tuning) produces a tuning that is
> equivalent to a machine tuning from Jim Coleman.  If whole roomfuls of piano
> techs are evenly divided on which of these two approaches are are better, are
> the differences any more than academic??  I think not.
> So, a valid decision to forego a machine may be made for reasons other
> than the results, but don't tell me that one or another is superior.   And
> for all of those techs who don't think their aural tuning is quite up to
> Virgil's level, you must decide for yourself if the additional quality found
> with a machine is worth the change.
> 
>> Eventually, I'll give up and either buy (or write)
>> an ETD, or quit tuning altogether. For now, it's me, my fork, and my stone
>> age  methods.
> 
> Cool, Ron.  Life is short.
> Regards, 
> Ed Foote RPT
> 
>