--- On Thu, 8/12/10, Fred Sturm <fssturm at unm.edu> wrote: Yep, late summer early fall is the worst time of year most places. Here, every single piano is quite sharp and unusably out of tune with itself, raucous and nasty. I start in four weeks before semester, running through all the pianos. The tuning doesn't hold real well, but it is a lot better starting point than if I started later -in which case I'd never catch up. They are still absorbing moisture and going sharp through September, so what I do early will go sharp and come back in about October, which makes it better than if I tune at the top of the moisture content. The critical pianos I'll be seeing often enough to keep them up. That's the way it used to be in the Southeast - or at least at the colleges I've worked for. 70-80% relative humidity in college buildings in August is pretty common here, with low tenor sections being 40 cents sharp, and you could always expect a cold snap before the end of September, which, with the flip of a switch completely undid all 125 of those pianos you put 5 weeks of very grueling work into tuning, and there would be where we got on the roller coaster until the end of Spring semester, when the humidity came back again for good.. But the last few years, maybe 7 to 9 years now, fall climate has been completely different. Every year you now wait for the mid semester changes that never come, and then the first cold snap of the year came inevitably over Thanksgiving break, with 10 days to try to schedule a bunch of tunings before exams. But you can't schedule expecting that, because it is not typically seasonal. It seems the quarter system was much friendlier for piano tunings than is the semester system. Fall quarter did not start until late September, and spring quarter tunings were generally more stable as you got out of the months wrought with deep cycling of humidity. Fred, gotta say I don't know how you do it as a half time tech. Last couple of days I've tuned a couple grands in a couple homes where owners don't try to fight the temperature changes. July 09, 79-82 degrees, 50-55% RH. January, 56-62 degrees (yes, Fahrenheit), humidity mid 30s. No humidity control, no Dampp-Chasers. I raise pitch in July/August and lower it in January, no more than 2 or 3 cents each way. That was not a typo. Raise pitch in summer, lower it in winter. None of this 40 cent pitch swings like in college work, AND, the pitch change is much more consistent from section to section. Jeff -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100812/7e9ecf79/attachment.htm>
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