<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> William, Your first question is about concert tunings, and your second one is about regular clients, so I am answering them that way. I start my response with this question--  What is meant by a stable tuning?  It could mean at least two things.  (1) Every note will stay exactly where I put it while tuning.  (2)  When the piano is being played, the tuning will not change. Now to my hunch (and that's all it is) on your question 1:  A change of 4 cents in the treble of a piano with normal tuning stability may cause surrounding notes to change somewhat during the process of tuning, but I see no reason why, when you are finished, further change will occur during the process of playing, if your tuning technique is up to par. Another question comes to mind:  I have four Steinway tunings recorded on RCT.  Every tuning shows adding between 46 and 56 cents to C8.  Am I really to believe that a 4-cent difference will be heard by anyone in the audience, or even by the pianist, given that various technicians will use various amounts of stretch?  (I'm not talking about unisons now.)  I doubt it.  So we have a non-standard target to start with. Question 2:  I charge extra any time I need to go over the piano more than once.  For more discriminating pianists the cents deviation from standard may be lower than others.  For clients who have the piano tuned annually, this change is rarely more than about 7 cents, so I do a one-pass tuning.  Beyond that, I usually make decisions on a case-by-case basis. I am sure we are not all going to agree on this issue.  If I admit to sometimes doing a one-time pass on an old beater that was up to 27 cents flat, as I did yesterday (I left it 5c flat), some will think I don't deserve to be called a piano technician.  To be certain, I wasn't very happy about doing that, but we've got to remember that it's the client's piano, and it's the client's money, so the client is the boss.  But this is one I won't be contacting about future service.  :-) Regards, Clyde Hollinger, RPT Lititz, PA, USA "William R. Monroe" wrote: <blockquote TYPE=CITE><style></style> I was reading an old essay (PTJ August '90) by Rick Baldassin regarding Piano Tuning Stability.  Within that article, Rick writes about tuning for a concert and remarks that after a rehearsal, the treble was really out.  'Why?  The treble notes were too far out of tune to create a stable tuning in one pass on the tuning.'  He stated that when he tuned the instrument prior to the rehearsal, the 6th and 7th octaves were flat, 'maybe as much as four cents.' So, in a nutshell, if your piano is four cents flat, your tuning will not be stable (for a concert level tuning). My questions: 1.) Really?  Is four cents flat too much to get a stable concert tuning? 2.) For our regular clients, when do we begin charging for a pitch raise, 5 cents, 10 cents, 20 cents?  I realize that neither all clients, nor their instruments will require this level tuning, but where do we draw the line and say we must raise pitch to get a stable tuning? I am very interested to hear as many opinions on this one as possible. Thank you, William R. Monroe PTG Associate Salt Lake City, UT</blockquote> </body> </html>