---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment I play the Prokofiev Toccato to test a piano's stability, and I have found very, very few pianos to hold up to that test (and it's not because I tuned them prior either). Robert Finley <rfinley@rcn.com> 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 Matthew Todd Todd Piano Works Piano Tuner/Technician Tuning - Repairing - Regulating __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/69/3e/17/86/attachment.htm ---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment--
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