I nominate Susan for the Barney Frank "Arguing with a dining room table" award. Will From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Susan Kline Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2011 3:17 AM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] Counts .......Duaine On 1/28/2011 10:58 PM, Duaine Hechler wrote: Oh contrariwise, I'm trying to convince those stubborn persons that a person can be a - real - professional - money earning - ETD tuner without needing to learn traditional aural tuning - except for some fundamental and final routine checks. It's possible that you can be one --- there are lots of people like that out there, who just get the machine and hang out their shingle. What isn't possible is to be a GOOD one. Everyone here has said the same thing over and over: the ETD tuning quality is limited unless you have the aural capacity to see whether or not the machine is giving you what it should. There are many circumstances where what the ETD tells you has to be adjusted for the particular piano you are tuning. Dean Rayburn himself got quoted to you, saying that very thing. You keep repeating the mantra that an ETD tuning is equal in quality to the best aural tuning, while omitting the crucial qualifier that the person using the ETD has to be able to check the results aurally and adjust the tuning when needed. What you say about attending Jim Coleman, Sr.'s aural tuning class and not being able to hear what he showed you is not encouraging, for sure, but it isn't the final word, either. Some people start out unable to hear these things, and then they have a breakthrough, sometimes quite soon, and move on from there just fine. Others just won't give up, and study carefully (and humbly) till it all comes right and they master what they have decided they want to learn. Some people fall into it like a duck to water, either because they have the knack or because they have such a strong background in music (like me) so that listening in a certain way is second nature. Of course someone who has studied a form of music requiring strong pitch control, like a stringed instrument, for 15 years, who then played professionally and taught the instrument for another six, is going to pick up tuning skills quickly. It's not that I didn't need to work on aural tuning, it's that most of the work had already been done before I started studying it, just another way. I've known other fine piano technicians who were oboists, played the French Horn, or majored in piano. It seems to me that you have some choices to make. You can lay aside your deep sense of personal injury -- no one here set out to make you fail, or even wants you to fail. Once you have defused the strong emotional burden you are laying on the topic of aural tuning, you can try, with help from others, and see how far you can get. You may think it is more impossible for you than it really is. On the other hand, while almost everyone who really wants to learn it somehow manages, you might be in the small minority who truly CAN'T get it. Until you give up the panic and stop blaming everyone except yourself for your predicament, you won't be able to find that out. Is it really a fate you cannot face if you truly can't learn aural tuning? You still have choices, even if you have tried hard and failed. (So far, as far as I can tell, you have tried, but not hard, and failed, and then had a double-dyed snit.) What kind of future is open to a piano tuner who can tune, but not very well? Plenty of options. Tune in places where no one is tuning at all, on pianos which are not going to sound very good no matter who tunes them ... you seem already to be doing that. Work on pianos instead of only tuning them. You seem to be doing that. Work in an affiliated field, like player technology. And you are doing that. Work on unusual pianos or other musical instruments, which no one else is working on, or at least almost no one else. And you seem to be doing that. The trick is to infuse quality into everything you do, whatever its nature. I have no way of knowing whether your player piano or pump organ rebuilding rises to that challenge, but I hope it does. Everyone needs to have SOMETHING going for them! The unadorned ETD tuning is not going to achieve quality, so that makes it doubly important that everything else you do contain it. So what is your problem? Why try to convince everyone on the list to accept something which they frankly know to be false (that a good ETD tuner doesn't need to master aural tuning), even when your opinion is contradicted over and over again, by EVERYONE who responds, whatever kind of tuner they are? You are not going to get the piano tech world to agree with you, but you assuredly will mess up your own reputation with them, as you certainly are doing. Look at their responses to you. They say it nicely, then they say it nicely again, then they say it firmly, then when you attack them vigorously for not giving in to your wishes, they ridicule you out of sheer frustration. It's not for love of laughing at you, it's frustration because you won't listen to what they say to you. Calling them names is not going to get you anywhere. Learn aural tuning or don't learn it -- but I feel you really need to give give up trying to convince everyone here that they are wrong about its value while you (and ONLY you) are right about its worthlessness. You are doing yourself an injury going on and on about that, when all the people you are scolding know THROUGH THEIR OWN DIRECT EXPERIENCE that you are mistaken. If I'm writing you at such length, it's because it is distressing to watch someone shaming himself in public, out of sheer obstinacy. Susan Kline -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20110129/47fe5eca/attachment.htm>
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