Raise pitch vr. Up to Pitch

[Jon Page]

My first question is:
Is this played much?   
Who playes it?   
Is someone playing for a party?
Is it played with other instruments ?  

You get the drift. Each piano we encounter does not have to be
at 440 when we walk out the door.

Circumstances will allow for a lower pitch. If  no one plays regularly,
and there is nothing to register it with, I'll raise it a max of 4 beats.
That way I feel it is still appreciably in tune. I suggest tuning at regular
intivals and raising it each time.  This is a pitch raise and I inform them
of that.

This way, I will not have wasted my time getting it up to pitch. And the
customer hopefully will see the benefit in regular servicing.  Then they can
decide if they want to properly maintain it.
They are the masters of their own destiny. (cool)

They'll do what they're gunna do. I've stopped trying to convince. I
explain the
situation, from there it is up to them.

"I can't afford to tune this, do you know what it cost the LAST time!?

So I pitch raise it. Tuning cost. It's their piano. It's not life threatening,
I am not the "Guardian of Pianos", nor am I a vigilante.  They are informed 
of the facts of the tuning and it is up to them to dedicate to piano
maintenance.

	That was just one scenario. Your scenario may vary.

Just what IS tuning anyways, isn't it to make it sound acceptabe?
And acceptable to whom?  One man's bread is another man's bird feed.

Ona has to weigh the situation and not give then customer an ultimatum.

Afterall, you're already there, sometimes it's PR before ego.









At 06:49 PM 11/22/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Dear Wim:
>First of all, I'd like to complement you on your excellent article in the
>November PTJournal.
>But...
>I'd like to suggest that your response [>In my opinion, you were dishonest,
>and cheated the customer.] seems a bit too strongly worded.
>My *initial* reaction was the same as yours, but after some thought I
>concluded that what he meant to say was that rather than doing a "sudden"
>pitchraise, for example with a 25% overshoot, he instead took the pitch
>barely up to A440 on each pass, necessitating 4 passes to stabilize the
>pitch and tuning.
>
>While I almost always do my pitchraises to A440 as rapidly as possible, it
>is legitimate to skip overpull on the first pass if the scale or string
>condition warns me that breakage is very likely.
>
>As to the amount that he charged for the "extra tuning" ... we all have
>different rates and approaches. Personally, my standard tuning fee is 1.5
>my hourly rate, and pitch raises are by the hourly rate on top of that (0.5
>to 1.0 hour). Not knowing his fee structure, I'm not ready to condemn him
>for his approach.
>
>Your explanation of how you would have approached the situation was how I
>usually approach the average piano.
>Happy Thanksgiving,
>Patrick Draine
>
>
>

Jon Page
Harwich Port, Cape Cod, Mass. (jpage@capecod.net)
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