Tuning Stabilty Question

[J Patrick Draine]

Unfortunately the desire to "save our organization some money " can 
clash mightily with the wish to provide optimal-sounding pianos. Plus 
you had the cycling air conditioning, which was an added stress factor.

What can you do to avert this problem next time? Perhaps some of the 
following suggestions:
1) Get the air conditioning  stabilized before your first pitch 
adjustment & fine tuning.
2) Book staggered 1 hr. rest periods for the pianos every other day. 
Unison touchup should take a fraction of that, but given that there may 
be string repairs etc. necessary that much time may be in order. 3) 
Hire someone else to do the tunings, or at least the touchup work. 
There's only so much a director can do -- delegation (or hiring) is the 
key.
4) Back to point #1, a stable environment is essential. I certainly 
hope the performance pianos were given more consideration in this 
regard.
5) The competition got great publicity, but life has been way too busy, 
so I didn't have a chance to attend. Maybe next time!
6) I'm sure various university techs who do this all the time will have 
more seasoned advice!
Patrick Draine
Billerica, MA

On Jul 4, 2005, at 1:26 PM, Robert Finley wrote:

> I would like to ask your opinion about piano tuning stability. Last 
> weekend we finished our international piano competition in Boston. It 
> began on Wednesday June 22nd. I was the director of the competition 
> and had a lot of administrative work to do.
>  
> A couple of weekends before the competition I made several visits to 
> the college and tuned four of the practice pianos, because last time 
> in 2003 they were badly out of tune. They hadn't been tuned since 
> January, the beginning of the semester, and I thought I would save our 
> organization some money.
>  
> The pianos were very old (looked as if they were from the early 
> 1900s), and consisted of two Steinway Bs, a Steinway A, and  a Baldwin 
> Hamilton Studio console.  They didn't seem to have been looked after 
> very well. There were paper clips, pins, dust and other debris inside. 
> Some of the tuning pins were rather loose. The music stand on a 
> Steinway B was broken and in terrible shape.
>  
> I used the SAT III to  to tune them. I applied strong blows to 
> equalize the tension in the strings, and lighter listening blows to 
> check the resultant tuning. When I finished each piano, there was a 
> very big improvement, and I could have given a recital on each of 
> them. The notes had a bell like clarity, although the tone of the 
> Baldwin upright was rather mediocre.
>  
> During the competition, the practice pianos were in use from 8 am 
> until 11 pm each day by contestants. They practiced such things as the 
> Prokofiev Toccata, Rachmaninoff Etudes, Liszt etc, and they began to 
> go out of tune. The air conditioning in the building cycled on and off 
> during the night and day. They were in quite out of tune by the end of 
> the competition.
>  
> My question is, would you typically expect pianos to go out of tune 
> under these circumstances or should they have held their tuning 
> better? I know it is difficult to say without seeing the pianos, but I 
> just wondered what your opinion might be.  I'm not sure what else I 
> could have done to make the pianos hold their tuning longer. I 
> couldn't go in to re-tune them because they were constantly in use by 
> the contestants from morning to late at night. I was also overloaded 
> with work, running the competition, so I wouldn't have had the time 
> anyway.
>  
> Thanks for your thoughts and a happy July 4th.
>  
> Robert Finley