I'm with you, Tanner, It was busy when Richard West retired and I took over almost 4 years ago, but the workload has increased a ton since I started. Now a new venue has opened up for faculty and ensemble recitals at our Art Gallery. If it weren't for Husker football games on Saturdays, I would be here 7 days a week.....Then there's spring semester! The pianos are really not getting enough attention, other than the concert and faculty instruments. Then again, I'm having to shave off time on recital tuning and care, and faculty needs, to tend to everything. Fortunately, the School of Music is thriving, and I'm glad to have a job. But as people have said, if all the pianos are only "half-good", then I am the only one to point a finger at. Some of our best graduate pianists do use the faculty pianos, and at least 3 of them are very powerful players. One of our grads breaks nearly a string a week. I don't understand how one can play so hard. I know, one of the Steinway B's which gets the most broken strings, has a capo-bar problem, but there's no time to fix it, restring, etc when it's used everyday. I have no replacement piano to take its' place, unless I take a lesser quality piano from a practice room for several months! This will not be smiled upon by the faculty member to which I refer. So, what do you all do with this? Paul From: "Jeff Tanner" <tannertuner at bellsouth.net> To: <caut at ptg.org> Date: 12/04/2009 01:38 PM Subject: Re: [CAUT] FW: Concert hall pianos ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Busby" <jim_busby at byu.edu> Yet another gripe of mine; students wearing out faculty studio Bs... They are in there 17 hours per day. As it is, we can barely keep up with tunings and broken strings there. I guess I should just grin and think of this as "job security". Add my gripe about professors teaching private lessons in their studios on university-owned instruments. Same thing. More maintenance required, but this time the institution is not benefitting from the use of the instruments. The problem with all of it is that all of the CAUT situations are dreadfully understaffed for piano techs. And as the activity level at the schools increases, and it does, there exists an inverse relationship of piano wear to accessibility for maintenance. And the already understaffed CAUTs start looking like they're no longer doing their jobs. ....which leads to my response to: "That’s one of the reasons I get to work at 5:30. I can get more done between 5:30 – 10:00 am than any other time. Afternoon is a lost cause." - dp I still don't understand why universities think they should expect their f/t piano technicians to work outside normal hours and pay them half what they could make working normal hours. The contract work I've done, the faculty and students will clear the room to get a piano tuned/serviced. Classrooms, teaching studios, everything short of scheduled rehearsals and performances. Tanner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20091204/e593e218/attachment.htm>
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