Duo piano tuning

[Robert Goodale]

Hi folks....

Yesterday I tuned for a duo piano concert featuring renoun Steinway jazz
pianists Ramsey Lewis & Billy Taylor. There evening performance drew a
nearly full house and a very appreciative audiance. To say the least
these pianist were exceptionally pleasant to work with, and had no
complaints regarding the pianos, my tuning, or the regulation/voicing.
Has anyone else out there in cyber-land had the opportunity to tune for
these guys?

I thought I would bring up an interesting and rather unexpected
observation. The two pianos that were used, both Ds, are new. One is our
house piano, #533099, and the other is a rental from the dealer,
#533755. With the serial numbers so close together I would assume that
they probably left the factory within a few months from each other.
I arrived at the auditorium at 7:00 AM prepared to tune the two pianos
matched together. I have done this before several times, the last time
with Duo pianists Richard and John Contiguglia in Des Moines, and
experienced absolutely no problems. Having these two new pianos with
closely matched serial numbers, I was expecting little difficulty.
Well.... 

The first thing I did was a brief experiment. I took readings from both
pianos with the S.A.T. and discovered significantly different stretch
numbers between the two. Our house "D" measured 7.2, 6.6, and 6.2.  The
rental D, however, measured 7.3, 8.3, and 6.0.  I then set a 2-octave
temperament on each piano to check for compatibility. While each piano
had a very nice and clean sounding ET with itself, they were noticably
incompatible with each other. Thus turning the keyboards to face each
other, I set sail on an interesting "temperamental journey" compromising
the two to sound good with each other as well as to themselves. The most
observable difference when I finished was some 5ths slightly more narrow
than usual on the rental piano. I don't think anyone else noticed the
variences but me, and as they say it was "close enough for jazz". When I
finished they both sounded quite good together as well as on their own,
but with limited time before they stage crew arrived it did become quite
a race against the clock to get the job done right.

Now OF COURSE I do typically expect some moderate variences on identical
pianos since no two are truly alike. I was, however, suprised to find a
variance to this degree. In short, I was wondering what other
experiences some of you might have had in matching pianos. Should I have
been suprised by this, or perhaps I have simply been "lucky" in past
experiences? It might be an interesting experiment to take readings from
various "D"s that some of you regularly work on and then post and
compair the stretch numbers. Has anyone run into any worse-case
scenarios where two identical pianos could absolutely not be matched
without obvious differences?
Just curious.


Rob Goodale, RPT