Hi Wim, The university was not happy with the work of the other tech. They kept him because the head of the music department who did not want to make the change since the head of the music department did not know of another RPT in this area and was told that an RPT is what a university should have. I found from the piano staff that they got information from the PTG web site and they thought that this is what most RPTs were like. I came to work for the university while he was still there. (The university got my name from a person who was in their orchestra. The old tech had tuned a piano for a performance and it was not a good tuning and the director of the musical asked if anyone in the orchestra knew of someone who could do a good job.)I was to work on the performance and teaching pianos while he did work for some of the professors that did not use their pianos very little and all of the practice pianos. I was happy with the arrangement and so was he so I came into this situation wh ile it was still going on. After the first year, I was asked to do all of the pianos and that they were letting the old tech go. I did not really want the extra work but I agreed and let a lot of my private work go. As far as the budget goes, after they university noticed what the pianos were like in the performance area, I got a huge increase in my budget. Before, some of the pianos were tuned only once a year. Except for the performance pianos, any of the other pianos were lucky to see two tunings a year. We are at a four times a year tunings for all of the pianos and I am close to getting a little more for additional tunings for some of the other pianos that are used extensively. I have also been given the money to rebuild and install new hammers on both of the Bechsein ENs as well as the Steinway A. I have also received enough extra money over the last two years to rebuild two Steinway Bs and am now working on rebuilding an M in my shop. It is amazing what a little good piano work can do to help a university. I am far from being what I would think of as a great tech, but it does show what attention to the details of good key, action, and voicing can do to help turn the pianos around. I agree with you about how it is that it is easier to find what is wrong with a piano when all of the keys are acting the same. The reason that I did what I did was to try to get the people in my chapter to look at the details and not be blinded by the "well, everything looks O.K." way of thinking. God bless Bill In a message dated 07/23/10 22:29:22 Atlantic Daylight Time, tnrwim writes: Bill If the university was "happy" with the work of the previous RPT, then there was no reason why they would think a non-RPT would do any better. There could be any number of reasons why the previous tech didn't do the work, including the lack of funds and/or time to do the work. Also, how long had it been since he left the school? The problems you encountered could have been created after he left. When you showed them how the pianos were supposed to be, you educated them on the importance of being an RPT. As I just mentioned in the other post, being an RPT should be a minimum requirement. Hopefully a school will do a more in depth interview, including a tuning demonstration, and get some letters of recommendations. As far as looking for specific problems with an action, I did the same thing once at a chapter meeting. I took one octave, and did something "wrong" to each key, and then asked others to figure out what was wrong with each key. As was in your case, there was only one tech who identified all the problems. The primary reason I think it was hard to do is that in general, when we encounter a piano, all of the notes will need let off adjusted, and/or drop or reps adjusted, etc. etc. It is much easier to identify a problem when all the keys have the same thing wrong with them. Wim -----Original Message----- From: wbis290 <wbis290 at aol.com> To: caut <caut at ptg.org> Sent: Fri, Jul 23, 2010 2:56 pm Subject: [CAUT] workload Hi All, Just an observation after reading about the workloads that most have to do for universities whether large or small and wandering why many universities don't specify that the technician should be an RPT. I am beginning to wander if it means anything to be an RPT. When Ohio Northern asked me to work for them, I was wandering why. The person who was doing the work for them was a long time RPT. I was asked to look at their pianos to see what the university was like and the condition of their pianos. I was surprised at what I found. In their performing arts building, the Steinway A was in terrible shape as far as voicing and regulation. Their 9' Bechstein EN had three strings missing and needed a ton of work. The Bechstein EN in their recital hall as almost as bad and the Steinway B in the recital hall also needed a lot of work. These were the good pianos. You should have seen the rest. I have spent 4 years catching up making the piano good.They were openly questioning me abo ut t he importance of being an RPT since the last person was an RPT and did such a poor job. My eyes were really opened when I was asked to give a class for our Guild chapter. I decided to take a Petrof grand and change things in the action and have the members figure out what was wrong with the individual notes and why and how it affected the touch, tone, and voicing of the piano and what would be the long term affects on the action if nothing was done. Only three RPT members had any clue as to what most of the problems were. The other RPTs could not figure most, and in some cases, any of the problems. These were not hard things to figure out but were simple things like jack to knuckle alignment, repetition lever height, ect. >From these two things as well as some other things such as cleaning up bad work that was done in private homes, churches, and schools that were done by RPTs, why would the universities specify that the person applying for the job be an RPT? Maybe the Guild should have some sort of follow up tech test that RPTs need to take every x number of years to keep their RPT status. Tuning does not seem to be the problem, but the technical part seems to be where the problem comes in for many RPTs. God bless Bill Balmer, RPT Ohio Northern University and the University of Findlay -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100724/e478b128/attachment.htm>
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