Orlando Tuneoff

[Jim]

et me be the first to mention that the Orlando Tuneoff was a great
success. It did have to compete with a very popular "hands on" type
of class, but there were about 60 people in attendance.

Virgil and I each tuned a piano ahead of time and then we each tuned one
before a very attentive audience. Just before the judging, the curtain
on stage was pulled and the pianos were switched around so that not even
we were able to tell which pianos we had tuned. The pianos were labelled
A B C and D. Each person was asked to place and X in the column of the
piano which he felt sounded the best tuning wise. After about half of the
musical selections were played, piano A was moved to the position of piano
D while the other three were moved one space to the left. This was 
done to rule out any advantage of position.

I went into this contest with great confidence. I was not the least bit
nervous. You might even say that it was over confidence because Virgil
won this time by about the same margin as I did last time. This has been
a good lesson to me about over confidence. Later, Virgil confessed to me
that he really expected to blow me away the last time we met. So I guess
we have both been providentially over-ruled and have deservedly had a 
good lesson in pride and selfconfidence. We did learn one thing about
conducting such a test the next time and that is that in order to rule
out any advantage which voicing might introduce, we should have had a
second go-around where we tuned the piano which the other one had 
previously tuned. I'm not using that as an excuse. He beat me fair and
square. However, the scoring was still within the 60-40 split which we
had both predicted.  He received 57%, and I received 43% of the vote.
Both of my tunings were done in nearly pure 5ths temperament. I measured
one or two notes in the high treble on his pianos afterwards and they 
were in the same ballpark as mine. The pianos were RX5's provided through
the courtesy of the Kawai America Co. Great pianos!

Jim Coleman, Sr.