Wow---I maintained that piano, I believe, for three or four years sometime in the last decade (2003-2007?) Then they changed the management regime, lost the high-end paradigm, consistently banged on me to lower my price and "besides, why do you have to mess with the piano so much?" Thus, the el cheapo "elderly famous studio tuner," who is literally 90 years old and refuses to give up, providing very good tunings ONLY---nothing else, EVER---for about half of what I charge. The only reason that Bosie isn't as torn up as the other studio pianos the "senior tuner" "maintains" is because the studio is kind of out-of-the-way and has a reputation as an expensive and boutique place---the piano gets softer, less frequent use. That's a great piano; one of the best 225s I ever put my hands on...I'm glad you got a chance to give it some love, Alan.... DA On Feb 12, 2011, at 11:22 AM, Alan Eder wrote: > And now back to octaves and unisons (although I have nothing against unions, especially the good kind!). > > I was asked to tune for a recording session in a very high end studio here in the Los Angeles area. Bosendorfer 225, nice piano. The pianist featured in the recording selected the studio for its general state-of-the-art-edness, and particularly for the high-end (treble) of the piano. The piece she was recording, with string quartet, was quite subtle--slow, quiet, much space between the attacks of notes. She hired this studio on the condition that she could bring in her own audio engineer and piano technician. > > I established in advance what the pitch should be, in conjunction with the manager of the studio (and running it by the string players). 440 is where he said they maintain their Bosie, and the strings were fine with that. I was to have 90 minutes with the piano (tune & some voicing as per the pianist's request), then the session would commence. (It went the full 7 1/2 hours available to them.) I was not engaged to stand-by or be on call, so leaving a stable tuning was the foremost consideration in my mind. When I arrived, I found the unisons and octaves sounding not too shabby. In a situation like this, however, close does NOT count, and "good enough" is not good enough. The pitch was generally between 440 and 441, so I made the executive/battlefield decision to depart from our agreement and set my SAT II at 440.5 (because it would require the least pitch change overall). That did not turn out to be a problem for anyone. > > As I went through the scale, I noticed that some notes were further off than others. B4 was a bit sharper than it's neighbors, for example. B5, even more so, and B6 about 13 cents sharper than the other pitches in that area. (For those amongst us who do not use gizmos and may not be familiar with the parlance, 13 cents is a substantial deviation when surrounding pitches are much closer to a given curve.) Knowing that the quality of chords (expected to be in equal temperament) in the high end was crucial to this piece, those "B"s (and certain other pitches, to a lesser degree) HAD to be reigned in. And they had to be stable enough to last all day with me 30 miles away. > > Like the man said, "Mission accomplished!" > > As I headed out of the studio, the manager approached me, noted he hadn't seen me there before and asked why I needed, "So much time with the piano." I gave a brief accounting of myself and inquired as to who normally services this instrument. A well-known and highly-thought-of tech here in L. A. who specializes in studio work. "Tunes by ear." I know this individual and attested to the fact that he is one of the best available. > > As I drove away, I couldn't escape the thought (we do a lot of thinking behind the wheel of our cars here in "Hell A.") that this piano probably gets those touch-ups by ear alone, which Israel has described so well previously in this thread, as a regular diet, not just while recording the same piece, but from session to session. It must have been a while since it was last thoroughly tuned, from scratch. > > So this was a situation distinct from that of touching up the tuning while a session is in progress. However, it is related in that touch-ups seemed to be the order of the day at this $175/hr studio (what, in order to save money--go figure?). Given that it is such a high-end operation, the reasoning behind that eludes me. > > Should I have changed the thread to, "When touch-ups become tunings"? > > FWIW, > > Alan Eder > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20110212/425879d0/attachment-0001.htm>
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