<HTML> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Gentlemen:     In our business accuracy means money. The customer is happy. Speed means money. I am happy.  Therefore it don't take a rocket scientist to realize if we strive for both speed and accuracy we can all be happy and I can be driving a Cadillac if I wish. Personally, I like riding in a Cadillac. Therefore I have worked to become both accurate and fast at tuning. Pianos below pitch 1/2 to l step can be accurately raised in 15 minutes. This ain't no hill for a climber. I do it all the time and I tune by ear. I worked real hard to achieve this ability. Why? Because I enjoy making other musicians besides myself happy and secondly, I enjoy riding in a Cadillac. For those of you who can't do it or feel it impossible; well, it don't really matter. What matters is are you happy. Remember, collectively, of all the jobs in the world, we are the happiest in our work. Just work at your own speed and ......BE HAPPY. Tommy Black Decatur, Ala. </BLOCKQUOTE> <<List, I remember years back going to the Little Red School House getting my first dose of speed and accuracy.  The discussion was on how long  should it take to regulate a set of dampers. Everyone gave their time estimates, some were as high as 4 hrs. . Then in walks in one of the factory damper regulators who does nothing else but concert Yamaha damper regulation. 18 minutes top to bottom.  Done. He was turbo charged like nothing else I have ever witnessed. The point in the discussion was we can either choose to pokey at a comfortable rate and do so-so work or we can go like a bat out of hell and have to pay extreme attention, something akin to a race car driver driving at 55 mph. vs. 220 mph.  Yamaha contends that working at an extreme fast rate yields not  only better production but with practice, better accuracy. You have to pay more attention and not let anything clog your thinking in order to do this correctly. However going at a snail's pace allows the mind to drift think about other things which are not pertinent to the issues at hand.  I have never forgotten that bit of advise and I find that I have applied that to many of the repetitive tasks. Tuning is high on the list for this idea.  10-15 mins. is just about all the time one really needs to make a pitch and tension adjustment. Like many have said on this list, it's really not a tuning as it is an adjustment. The goal is get the pitch into the ballpark without wasting valuable time and effort. Tom Servinsky,RPT >> I really like these two comments.  Part of the presentation that George Defebaugh and Jim Coleman gave at the 1979 Convention in Minneapolis was called none other than "Speed & Accuracy".  The concept caught my attention.  When I attended the Kimball factory seminar in 1982, I saw factory personnel working at what seemed to me to be impossible speed and with intense concentration. I told myself that I could only become a superior technician when I could do all of the tasks which are part of my work with the same speed and accuracy as a factory worker has.  I set out to achieve that goal and by doing so, live a comfortable lifestyle with a good income and enjoy the leisure pursuits of my own choice and whim. But what I also see in this and many other discussions of the past is criticism of these kinds of goals.  There is the implication that one must be "crazy" to work so fast.  Even the title, "Speedy Gonzales" serves to demean and ridicule such goals.  If you have these kinds of skills, you are something to laugh at, only a caricature of what a "normal" technician should be. I've seen this kind of desire to hold others back, to dumb down and to seek the lowest common denominator my entire career as a piano technician.  When I first joined PTG, my skills were limited.  Others in my Chapter delighted in ridiculing my limitations and flaunting their superiority, setting themselves up from that moment on as the leaders, the teachers, the ones in charge and I was to be the one who must be trained and controlled and who would never be expected to do anything beyond mediocre work. I made up my mind to attend every regional seminar, convention and factory training session I could manage to afford.  I studied and practiced the views of many different people who were tops in their field.  Even though I qualified to train as an examiner as early as 1983, members of my chapter refused to allow me to participate.  I clearly remember the admonition, "...this is for experienced *men*, not you." Time went on and I still stuck to what I knew was best for me.  I qualified to be an examiner and now have done that work for over 10 years.  I've seen and heard everything including the *fact* that the one who claimed to be an "experienced man" habitually makes the common error called, Reverse Well.  It only makes me laugh.  Hmmm, "judge not, lest ye be judged". I consider the fact that I developed my own temperament and octave tuning system, now in use for 10 and 15 years respectively to merely be the natural evolution of a set of skills learned from people who were superior in the field, not those who wished to hold others back and down. When I first joined this list about 5 years ago, I fully expected to meet the kind of resistance I did from the keep-it-dumb crowd, the baloney bunch.  "You made up your own tuning???!!!!"  "Why don't you use one from a book like everyone else?"  Even most others who are in the vanguard of temperament practice seek to keep it as low and dumb as possible.  Just dial in these numbers and out it will come.  When somebody complains about it or questions it, run, don't walk back to the safety of the way everybody else is doing it. So, my answer to those who offer any criticism or ridicule of the concept of Speed & Accuracy is to step aside.  If you are slow and like it that way, it's nothing to be ashamed of but it is certainly not a goal to promote as somehow being something better. I think it's high time that excellence and superiority be seen as worthy goals in our profession.  This idea that we should all be equal, that no one is any better at anything than anyone else is self defeating.  No one will achieve excellence and superiority by advertising it or bestowing oneself a title, only by making up one's mind to be the best that one can be by working at it consistently day after day, will it be done. My opinion, no humility implied nor offered. Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin <A HREF="http://www.billbremmer.com/">Click here: -=w w w . b i l l b r e m m e r . c o m =-</A> </HTML>