How in the heck were you able to do that? I remember first doing pitch raises and bringing the piano just slightly above pitch as you mentioned. But then, when I went back to the treble, I found that most dropped to below 25 cents or more! It only took me a few of those to realize I needed a heck of a lot more overpull than what I was doing! Otherwise I would be stuck with doing 2 pitch raises in a single appointment, or leave with a very unstable tuning. Matthew --- On Sun, 12/13/09, Rob McCall <rob at mccallpiano.com> wrote: From: Rob McCall <rob at mccallpiano.com> Subject: Re: [pianotech] pitch raise To: pianotech at ptg.org Date: Sunday, December 13, 2009, 2:51 AM I haven't done very many pitch raises because I'm still fairly new, but I took some advice I received from Jer "Speedy" G about speed and applied it to my pitch raises. I use an ETD (SAT IV) but I don't use the overpull function (primarily because I haven't learned how to use it yet!) but I found that I haven't needed it much. Here's the situation behind my first "rapid" pitch raise. My 12 year old daughter won first place in a songwriting competition and was to play that evening at a district-wide event. They said they had a fairly new piano, the school was only two years old, and the piano sounded fine. Wanting to make sure my daughter sounded the best she could, I decided to stop by the school that afternoon just to check it out. I just "happened" to have my tuning kit with me, figuring maybe a unison or two might need some touching up. What I found was a 2007 Yamaha P22 that hadn't been tuned since new. It was 40-70 cents flat and not a single unison sounded good. I had less than 3 hours before the show started. Since this was to make my own child look wonderful, :-) and the school wasn't going to pay, I volunteered to donate a tuning to the school. I loaded in the P22 page on my SAT and starting at A0, I just started pulling up pitches and unisons as I went, using a single mute. On the trichords, I'd mute the C and R strings, tune the L, move the mute 1 string to the right, then match the C to the L, then I'd pull the mute, placing it in the next C and R position, and pitch up the R string so that it sounded close to the L and C strings I'd just tuned. I just moved as fast as I could. Instead of calculating overpull, I just brought each note up to pitch, and made the lights spin (about 2 lights/second) ever so slightly on the sharp side using the SAT. As I got to the last 2 octaves, I tried to get it as close to on pitch since I figured the rest of the piano is fairly close to pitch, I surmised that I didn't need to pull the last one's so high as most of the required tension was pulled up. Bottom to top, it took me 20 minutes! My previous pitch raise took me 90 minutes. And you know what, I was much happier with this one! When I went back to tune, I found most pitches to be within 5 cents or less and I was able to speed through the tuning much faster. So, I went from a 3 hour tuning and pitch raise on my prior piano, to having this one pitch raised and tuned in a total of 1 hour and 45 minutes. I was very pleased. Since then, I've done 3 other pitch raises the same way with very good results. So, while not totally scientific, I found it to be time-saving and productive. And I think my tunings sound better, too. By the way, the piano sounded beautiful to even my discriminating ear that evening. Or maybe it's just because my daughter was playing the piano. Either way, I was smiling! While tuning, I also gave out cards to about 9-10 different parents who were helping to decorate, because they said they needed their pianos tuned, too! Win-win for everyone!! Sorry for the length of my post... but this topic reminded me of my paradigm-shifting event. I'll see if I can post a link to my daughters performance (which included a mic malfunction) and maybe I can get some feedback on the tuning. Or you can just tell this proud parent that his daughter sounded wonderful! :-) Regards, And thanks "Speedy" G. :-) Rob McCall McCall Piano Service, LLC Murrieta, CA rob at mccallpiano.com www.mccallpiano.com 951-698-1875 On Dec 12, 2009, at 16:57 , pianolover 88 wrote: Pretty basic stuff. When pianos are pitch raised, they will typically drop by about 1/3 of the overpull. So if a piano is 100 cents flat, you would want to raise pitch about 33 cents past A440, since it will drop about that much after the PR. I find that bass strings typically drop far less than rest of the piano, and so they don't require as much overpull. Terry Peterson Accurate Piano Service UniGeezer.com "Over 50, and not "2" Tired!" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091212/28e7601e/attachment-0001.htm>
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