floor tuning job...

[Ron Nossaman]

> I fear that
>many of  the authors have too many years between today and when they started
>though. I have been tuning for two years now and just recently did my very
>first tuning in less than 1 hour (58 minutes). 

This isn't immediately helpful, but generally, it may be. Every new tuner I
ever worked with has spent way too long, at way too fine a level of detail
with their tuning. As a training experience, I've always recommended they
charge through a  
tuning as fast as they can. If they take a full hour, they're wasting too
much time on the petty details. I tell them they will feel like they are
doing a TERRIBLE job, but not to slow down and "fix" anything until they
are completely through the piano. Then, go back and check how it came out.
Every one of the people I convinced to try this was convinced I was brain
damaged for suggesting such a thing, but gave it a shot anyway. They were
universally amazed that the finished tuning was much better than they had
anticipated, and both their tuning speed, and the quality of their work
improved in the next month. Most newbies spend way too much time trying to
tune beyond the resolution of the pianos they are working on when they
should be looking for the greatest return on sweat applied.

I see everyday aural tuning as a sort of triage situation. You have to
decide, as you go, which problems you can fix, and which you can't, and
leave the dead where they lie. It's a matter of prioritizing effort against
result, a hundred times a minute, and not wasting time chasing after the
phantoms. Granted, this gets to be so automatic after a while that you
aren't aware it's happening, and you one day realize that you have tuned
most of a piano on auto pilot, while the rest of your brain cells were
designing that new shop jig you have been thinking about recently. In
situations where the piano is tunable beyond the level required for
showroom floor stock, you have to give it more of your attention. In some
tuning situations, you have to give it everything you have got or can
borrow, but you can't waste that kind of effort in an average situation.

This isn't to advocate sloppy work, just a call for conservation of resources.

FWIW,

Ron N