Another Tough Tuning Environment (2 tuners in same room)

[Robin Blankenship]

I've been waiting a long time for a spot to relate this little story... 
Having heard from other techs in my raw rookie days about difficult tuning 
situations, I decided to inoculate myself by practice tuning with the opera 
on full blast in my shop on Saturday afternoons. That little bit of 
silliness paid off handsomely later.

I was once in a guy's house, tuning his piano in the living room while, at 
the same time, he was right around the corner from me in the kitchen, 
running a chain saw, cutting up his ceiling predatory to remodeling. I 
figured that if I could get through Verdi and Wagner and Der Rosenkavalier 
in one piece, a mere screaming two-stroke chainsaw motor would be easy.

Well, maybe not exactly 'easy', but it was doable. And, like Jim, it was a 
decent tuning when all was done.

A few years later, while working for a retail piano outfit, I had to crash 
tune a rented grand on a bandstand, while the band was warming up and a 
freight train was rumbling by not 50 feet away from me.

Once again, it was the Texaco Metropolitan Opera to the rescue.

We miss you, Milton Cross!!!

Robin Blankenship
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Johnson" <jhjpiano at sbcglobal.net>
To: "Pianotech List" <pianotech at ptg.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 11:26 AM
Subject: Re: Another Tough Tuning Environment (2 tuners in same room)


> That reminds me of an experience I had a number of years ago tuning 
> college practice room pianos.  I finished a tuning at the same time that 
> my assistant finished his and we had one piano left to do.  We were both 
> tired and neither one of wanted to do it, so we compromised.   I tuned the 
> temperment, then I tuned to the top of the piano while he tuned to the 
> bottom, getting the piano done in half the time.  We are both aural tuners 
> so you can imagine the challenge.  It was actually fun and the piano 
> turned out to be very well tuned.  However, once is enough--I've never 
> repeated the exercise.
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Ron Nossaman" <rnossaman at cox.net>
> To: "Pianotech List" <pianotech at ptg.org>
> Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 9:52 PM
> Subject: Re: Another Tough Tuning Environment
>
>
>>
>>> 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
>>
>>
>
>