Alan I would question the owner. A note would not go back up a step all by itself, without bringing some of the notes around it with it. I have a sneeky suspicion that this guy is trying to tune the piano hiself, but has no clue what he's doing. Willem (Wim) Blees, RPT Piano Tuner/Technician Mililani, Oahu, HI 808-349-2943 Author of: The Business of Piano Tuning available from Potter Press www.pianotuning.com -----Original Message----- From: reggaepass at aol.com To: caut at ptg.org Sent: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 2:26 pm Subject: [CAUT] interesting alternative tuning experience List, I just had my second go-around at trying to get a piano that had been tuned in an unusual way for a long time back to "normal". It was in a tuning that had some notes near normal tension, others up to a quarter-tone flat, and still others as far sharp(!). In addition, the piano had been in that tuning for the past eight years (most of them in Germany--it is a 1904 Schwechten grand with a bridge design I've not seen before). On my first visit to start the long journey home to equal temperament at A=440, I started by doing a pass using the pitch-change function on an Accutuner (which determines off-sets for each note independently of what came before, and I measured for every note). That got it close enough to follow immediately with a straight machine tuning (with recalculated FAC), unisons-as-you-go from A0 to C8. The piano had been vastly transformed, although I20cautioned that there were no guarantees how long it would sound in tune. The owner reported that the piano started going out of tune within weeks of the last servicing. When I returned for a follow-up visit three and a half months later, I was unprepared for what I encountered. Some notes, the ones that had been sharp, had crept back up in pitch, many nearly 100% (!!) of the way back up to where they had been for those eight long years. I've done many alternate tunings, almost always lowering pitch and never raising individual notes more than 10 cents or so. But after a pitch-raise and a tuning or two, things have always returned to normal in a rather predictable way. I have never tuned notes 50 cents sharp nor have I ever left an alternative tuning on a piano for more than a few weeks at a shot. (Last week we tuned a concert grand to select instruments from one of our Balinese gamelans, but the piano spent less than a week from the first "Balinese" tuning to the retuning to ET @440.) Has anyone else out there had any experience with notes and/or entire pianos being tuned sharp for prolonged periods of time? If so, did you observe the same kind of behavior upon retuning? What would be the most efficient way to get it back to "normal"? Thanks & Happy Holidays, Alan Eder Listen to 350+ music, sports, & news radio stations – including songs for the holidays – FREE while you b rowse. Start Listening Now! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20081217/f3f85f9c/attachment-0001.html>
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