State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY Joseph Vitti Piano Technician Music 516 632-7330 07-Feb-1996 09:26am EST FROM: JVITTI TO: Remote Addressee ( _pianotech@byu.edu ) Subject: Concert tuning stability fuse I have read with interest the posts about tuning stability and would like to add my two cents. Before coming to StonyBrook I was a Concert tech for Baldwins national artist dept. in NYC. I was formally trained in the "speciality". For those years I did nothing else. Baldwins C&A departments motto was the piano had to come off stage after a concert the way it went on. While I am sure there are other ways of stablizing a concert instrument,both Steinway & Baldwin concert techs in those days tuned very hard indeed. The idea is not to "hammer the strings down to pitch" without the need for good hammer technic, but to hit the piano harder than any concert pianist can and will. One "test" blow however hard will not tell if the note will stay in tune. Certainly not when the pianist is playing extremely hard repeatedly. I for one don't want to sit in the audience squirming in my seat wondering if the tuning will last. It's the hard tuning with precise hammer technic that will keep a concert piano in good tune on stage. It has worked for me for twenty years: never killed a piano although I would have liked to, never any trouble with tendonitis.
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