In a message dated 1/29/00 3:35:30 PM Pacific Standard Time, keyboard@cysource.com writes: << As usual, my point was completely lost! I must have some difficulty expressing myself. I was attempting to determine whether Steve Fairchild's 5-minute piano tuning was ever checked for ACCURACY by ANYONE. And, again as usual, instead of a straight answer, the responses take the form of personal attacks. Believe me, I am under no "illusions", I am certainly not naive and I am obviously not the one who is mixed up. >> This used to happen to me with just about every post I wrote. I found it hard to believe some of the conclusions people would jump to. When you can't hear the person speaking, you don't get the all important factor of tone of voice and also you don't see the body language. My advice is to just be cool about it if someone flies off the handle. Every so often, people bring up the Exam as a standard for comparison. In a lot of ways it makes sense to do this but in this instance, Fairchild's quick tuning, there is no way to apply the Exam standards to it. First of all, the piano used in the Exam is tuned by committee and detuned in a specific way, alternately sharp and flat. This is done deliberately so as to not present a pitch raise or lowering problem. The recent threads have talked about pitch raising a piano, then fine tuning it as quickly as possible, unisons and all. In the Exam, only one string per note is tuned and judged. There are different tolerances for the starting note, A4, the temperament octave, the midrange, the treble, high treble and bass. Only the unisons from C3 to B4 are evaluated and this is regardless of their pitch as relates to temperament. Stability is also judged. No one ever talked about whether you might be able to knock one of the unisons in Fairchild's demonstration out of tune with a few good test blows. His goal was like many other world's records, to find the absolute limit that someting can be taken to. In this case it was just to see how fast you could move through a piano and get some reasonably good results. If the piano really didn't sound good afterwards, it would have been judged to be an invalid attempt. No one ever suggested that this should be what people do on a regular basis. What has come to light is that many of us can do a reasonably good job of tuning the piano in an hour or less. I like to think that I leave every piano that I tune in a state that would meet Exam standards and usually like to think that it would meet the high end of those standards. But there is really no way to test any of my tunings or anyone else's exactly the way they do in an Exam situation. I can usually do a really fine job of tuning a piano that would meet the expectations of any customer and satisfy my own concept of professional standards in less than an hour. But I also know that if I want it to be any better, I can easily take 2 or 3 hours. On some of the pianos that I tuned at Conventions for an evening recital, I literally took all day to tune it and still wasn't completely satisfied that it was "perfect". When I met with Virgil Smith RPT in Chicago last September, I told the audience that I had in fact, never really finished tuning any piano, ever. I had either quit when I had no more time or I left it when I felt that it was "acceptable" under the circumstances, but never has there been a really "perfect" tuning. At that meeting, I took an hour and a half and was done just in time to go to dinner. I would have much rather done one of my all day work ups of a real custom tuning but the generic program for the Steinway M that I have worked just fine. Fairchild's tuning was judged by the professional piano technicians that witnessed it to be good enough to be considered a valid tuning. I think it is best left at that. The Exam is a theoretical and very specific exercise. We may, from time to time refer to certain tolerances that it uses as a way of establishing our own tolerances but we have to bear in mind that a person does not really tune the whole piano in the PTG Exam the way everyone must do every time in our daily work. This means, in the end, that the PTG Tuning Exam, as a whole, cannot be used as a valid way to judge any real life piano tuning. Sincerely, Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin
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