All I can say is I'm glad I didn't bring up the man/woman thing. I'm sure I'd be hearing all kinds of MCP accusations by now. No, I have not bought into the tuning test as the ultimate reality for tuning quality. Please don't be insulting, I'd like to think it's beneath you. I bring up the PTG tuning test because we hold that as a standard by which we measure some level of aural skill and base the highest level of classification we have on passing that test. If it has no meaning in terms of quality or if tuning quality is simply a matter of personal taste then why bother to try and set a standard? Anybody could simply argue that their own tunings are quite musical. Your other recent comment about the unimportance of temperament accuracy also flies in the face of this standard. If such variation in temperament tuning is common and to you acceptable, then why is that the most critically judged part and, in fact, the part that prevents most people from attempting or passing the test to begin with. Perhaps a note to the examining committee suggesting a reevaluation of these standards is in order. (Something tells me you'll be hearing from Duaine on this soon.) Why would you presume that *any* etd users would lose their sense of the voice of the piano. And if you consider the RPT exam to be meaningless, why would you think that any aural tuner would have any sense of the "voice" of the piano. What someone uses to tune the piano simply has no bearing on this particular ability if it's even a relevant description. Regarding your "poor silly", if he can't tune clean unisons how would you even know what his sense of stretch is? Which one of those unstable unisons might represent his best judgment. I come to pianos not infrequently where someone's sense of stretch has the last octave stretched way beyond reason, a personal choice. That doesn't make it right. And as far as Mr Sambell's experience with one customer, we've all had similar experiences of quirky requests. But as the French would say, une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps. Or for those of you who don't speak French (myself included, it's just one of my favorite sayings) , one swallow does not make the spring. I often do need to get through 5 pianos in a day btw. Once in a great while six. When that happens I want to be sure that the last piano of the day is tuned with as much care and attention to detail as the first. Not just "acceptable" but to a high standard. If I tune those pianos aurally, after the fourth piano I've spend some 6 hours, typically, and I can almost assure you that the next one will suffer some. Using an etd, I've spent 4 hours at that point and have no doubt that the quality of that 5th tuning will be as good as the first. That counts, especially to the customer who is 5th in line that day. I have no interest in trying to fight the public illusion about etds. What does concern me, however, is the myth being perpetuated by those in the trade. They should know better by now. David Love www.davidlovepianos.com From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Susan Kline Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 2:41 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] [Pianotek] the big discussion David, you certainly have bought into the PTG tuning test as the ultimate reality for tuning quality. I tend to approach the issue of tuning quality in a more ( .... global? .... ) manner. Maybe it's partly to do with the way men and women view reality, though we don't want to start a gender war. In general (and one can't make blanket assumptions) men tend to focus very tightly, and use the left hemisphere. Women, with 12 connections across the corpus callosum instead of one, use both hemispheres and blend a lot of different aspects of a problem instead of focusing on just one. (as in, CENTS DEVIATION FROM THE ACCEPTED NORM!!!) So, sometimes women seem sort of scatty to men, air-headed and all over the place, but from their own point of view, they are blending many different aspects of a situation, so they experience a more complicated reality (and will tell you about it BY THE HOUR!) Tunings are more than just cents. Octave stretches are subtle. There is no RIGHT versus WRONG. Would you like for your aural tuning to by 85% RIGHT? Or 100% RIGHT? I don't think tuning works this way, on a musical plane. And when you propose equally "solid" unisons, as if they were a single, known quantity, I don't think unisons work like that, either. Unisons combine with voicing to give the piano a tone of voice. Of course one doesn't want them wandering all over, but staying put is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the character of unisons. This is highly individual. Each tuner (and sometimes even the less officially skilled ones) imparts his or her own voice to a piano. This voice is part of what certain (but certainly not ALL) ETD tuners may lose contact with. Thinking "Right, Wrong" by the hour might blunt that sense of the subtle tone of voice, which also has to take into account each piano's own unique character. Some instruments seem almost TOO human! This is one reason I <shudder> when people talk about needing to get through 5 pianos a day, five or six days a week. Not just because I'd crash after trying three a day for a week, and be fit for nothing for quite awhile. Of course this bulk work does need doing, and families need supporting. The machine tuning, intelligently used, will get these pianos to an acceptable state in a short time each. But something personal is lost in this quantity of overwork, IMO, and that personal activity with a piano, especially a good piano, can deliver something to a customer not measured in percentages. Consider someone (the poor silly) who has a somewhat (oddball? but sweet) sense of tone and a wonderful sense of stretch, but maybe his unisons aren't "solid", maybe they even have some beating, but the way he glues them together gives a sort of charming (if eccentric) personality to an instrument. Ted Sambell has a lovely story about an old lady who cried after he tuned her old neglected piano because without the beating unisons her piano didn't "sing" anymore. So he carefully put exactly the same little beat in the left string of each and every note. (Hi, Ted! I hope I'm remembering this wonderful story right.) And then she told him, "Well, at least you finally got it right!" Continuing on with my own hypothetical silly tuner story ... suppose his temperament isn't so hot, either, but by long practice he's got it figured out so that most of the fifths of the common keys are nearly beatless, the fourths of the common keys are tolerable, and the mess gets shoved into places less likely to show up when playing simple music. (And lots of customers play only simple music.) In essence, this individual version of not-quite-equal seems to me to be a common 19th century approach to tuning. Now, adding all this up, when people without much contact with high quality concert tuning play simple music on the old uprights this guy tunes, it sounds .... well, very nice. And he probably would get about 40% on the PTG tuning test, if that. Tune it spiffy-perfect 100% PTG standard -- well, they might absolutely despise it. For other customers, it would be pretty awful, no doubt, but I find customers tend to figure out who suits them, if they have a variety of piano techs to try. You talk about fighting the public image that a computer tuning is less musical than an aural tuning. That very persistent image was earned fair and square about twenty-five years ago. How stubborn this idea remains once established is something tuners should probably have guessed before they pulled out their SOT's and ignored complaints from their customers by telling them that the machines were right. I take everyone's word for it that the quality of the ETD tunings bears no comparison with the earlier ones, and this stereotype of machine tuning has been fading for awhile. I don't hear it nearly as often as I used to, so ... there's hope for the digitally enhanced piano tech. Many probably don't hear this complaining at all anymore. In this discussion we've been talking over and over about "highly skilled" on both sides of the aisle. I'm not sure I'd use that term exclusively. Perhaps it might be more realistic to say that some aural tuners (SOME of them, mind) are "differently skilled." Susan Kline -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20110131/c82013d3/attachment-0001.htm>
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