Another Tough Tuning Environment

[Ron Nossaman]

> Well, I thought I would include another short sound clip from a tough 
> tuning location.
> 
> NAMM show is this week!
> 
> Don Mannino


Ah, memories! A bunch of years back, we had a local 
"pianorama" sort of thing. I don't recall what it was actually 
called, but it aspired to somewhat greater class, and the 
participation of all the local dealers and factory 
representatives of the piano brands they dealt. The venue was 
a large hall with a killer echo and at least a half dozen 
folks tuning at any given time, or trying to, around not only 
each other, but the usual setup and shouted conversational 
noise we've all learned to love. I had already tuned six or 
seven for a couple of local dealers, and was more brain dead 
than usual, when I stopped by the Kawai booth to give Ray 
Chandler a hard time (which seemed like a worthy end in 
itself, at the time). He was looking at tuning a fair number 
of pianos in an impossible situation, and "generously" offered 
to hire me to tune a couple of his for him. Hey - never mind 
if the mule goes blind, just load the wagon. Sure, why not? My 
approach in these situations is to make marginally more noise 
tuning than the sum total of everyone else in the vicinity 
(which I'm told I can do well enough), and it seems to work as 
well as anything else I could do as an aural tooner. I whacked 
one out, and was coming down from the top, tuning unisons 
(strip mute), on the second when I realized that Ray was 
coming up from the middle and we were converging on the killer 
octave of two pianos from different directions. Ray was in 
another place by then - the tuner's fugue state, and hadn't 
seemed to have noticed this, so I stopped tuning a unison 
short and waited... When he got to where I had set the trap, I 
struck the note as he was in the middle of tuning the same 
note. It was cruel, I know, like an ice cube down your shorts, 
but I was pretty far gone by then and entirely too desperate 
for entertainment for decent considerations of propriety. It's 
the only defense I have. Take it or leave it. In any case, the 
result was as gratifying as anything I could have hoped for. 
He stood up straight suddenly (can't imagine why someone would 
stand to tune when he could sit - a mystery), looked at me, 
and said "You waited for me!".

He forgave me, I think, seeing the humor in the situation. But 
that was years before I told the story to the world. I guess 
I'll have to see how it goes from here...

Ron N