Absolutely! I think that should be SOP anyway. Trust but verify. I always at least test the octaves as I go and drop in occasional tests that I can do with one hand (speed counts). That would be fourths, fifths, thirds, sixths, 3rd-10th. Not on every note necessarily. When you get really efficient you can test while you're moving mutes--multi tasking. Of course, I'm a guy so that's easy for me ;-). It's more important through the known problem areas of the piano: low tenor and tenor bass break, tenor/treble strut, upper bass. Keeps you sharp and thinking but it's more for verification than it is for actually deciding where the note is to go initially. That speeds things up quite a bit. Tune to the machine, verify, change if necessary. Overall, I find there are relatively few changes that need to be made and not having to go through the checks to decide where to put things saves a lot of time and energy. Of course, when tuning aurally you can ignore the checks and just drop it where the octave sounds ok. But that's cheating. David Love www.davidlovepianos.com One thing that helped me become a better aural tuner was to listen to the intervals as I was machine tuning- especially on a nicer piano. Play the octave, do a 4th & 5th test. Then every once in awhile, do some chromatic 10ths, 17ths or other tests. You'll start to hear things out of place. Go back and tweak, fudge what the machine tells you. You have permission. You've been tuning long enough that you may be surprised at what you hear and what you can improve. Dean
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