The novice

[Farrell]

> "a note 12 cents sharp might be next to a note 15 cents flat.....attribute
that to a "tooner"
> who had no idea what he was doing.  Am I right?"

It is scary. But I know for a fact that I have followed RPTs at tuning a
piano by less than two weeks and found notes that were 10 cents sharp right
next to a note 10 cents flat - beat rates and an AccuTuner indicated this
(this is a piano that the same person had been servicing twice a year for
many years). The client showed me their receipts. They said it sounded bad
right after the dude "tooned" it. I can only assume that the "tooner" (who
KNEW what he was doing) deliberately made the decision to do a quicky sloppy
tuning because the client didn't play paino all that well, or the piano was
not of sufficient quality, and the client would not be able to tell. (Maybe
a severe hangover? Maybe an undiagnosed medical condition?) I don't know -
scary and sad.

Terry Farrell
Piano Tuning & Service
Tampa, Florida
mfarrel2@tampabay.rr.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Clyde Hollinger" <cedel@supernet.com>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 7:10 AM
Subject: The novice


> Friends,
>
> I am taking this post in a different direction.  Sometimes on the first
> visit to a client I find the tuning so strange that I think a novice must
> have tuned it the last time.
>
> For example, yesterday I tuned a spinet that I had last tuned in May,
1991,
> but the client assured me that someone else tuned it in 1998.  It had been
> moved to a son's house and back.  Before I started, the bass was up to 11c
> sharp, the treble was up to 28c flat, but what I found unusual was that a
> note 12 cents sharp might be next to a note 15 cents flat, and this
occurred
> throughout although mostly in the center section.
>
> When whole sections of the piano are uniformly out of tune, I can easily
> account for that, but when a section has differences of up to 25 cents on
> adjacent notes, I can only attribute that to a "tooner" who had no idea
what
> he was doing.  Am I right?  I decided it was prudent not to express my
> thoughts to the client.
>
> Regards,
> Clyde Hollinger
>
>
> > If I were to encounter a piano that had been just tuned to an historical
> > temperment I'm sure I'd think that the piano had been tuned by a novice.
> >
> > Tom Ayers
>
>
>
>