Steinway vs. The Tuner, Round One

Jon Page jonpage@attbi.com
Thu, 12 Sep 2002 21:21:40 -0400


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Just one comment on your 'technique'.
Do NOT lower the tension by that much (45 degree turn) !
Lower the tension just until you hear the friction 'pop' which will only be 
a few beats, if that.

I use a slow pull technique and do not hit the key hard and I do not have 
stability problems.
It's a technique of ever decreasing overpull/lowering operations with the 
final tweak on the up-pull
to leave the string segment between the counter bearing bar and tuning pin 
with a higher tension than the speaking length.

Regards,
Jon page

At 07:15 PM 9/12/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>I don't have a lot of S&S experience (in the Ozarks? Gimme a break!) but I 
>do tune a few.
>
>Tuned an "L" infantile horizontal piano today and got thinking while 
>wrestling with it. Pinblock quite tight (somewhat jumpy pins), string 
>movement resistance quite high, and the collarless pins VERY sensitive to 
>pressure in any direction--up pitch, down pitch, flagpoling, whatever.
>
>I find many notes very hard to pull in for sweet unisons. I was personally 
>taught by Randy Potter how to tune stable strings & pins but found that 
>moving the pin in teeny notches is very hard--too high, too low, too high ...
>
>If I got it just a hair over pitch and tried to settle everything with 
>back pressure on the hammer, it dropped way too much. Finally, with time 
>running out and getting a little desperate, I started dropping pitch 
>(about a 45 degree turn of the hammer) and tuning "from the bottom" with a 
>smooth steady pull while wanging the string pretty hard. Most of the time 
>I could stop right on pitch --even on strings I had spent WAY too long 
>trying to tune the "normal" way.
>
>But I worry about how stable they are as I could not "set" the pin in the 
>usual way.
>
>Is this pretty typical Steinway?
>
>What about stability in these circumstances?
>
>What hammer techniques do y'all use on the beasts?
>
>NOTE: While tuning, I was rehearsing a pretty negative inner dialog about 
>Steinway and all of their "genuine Steinway parts;" thinking how expensive 
>they are and how much they look like every other piano, etc. BUT after I 
>tuned it, I played it. Even for a small piano, what a beautiful, sweet 
>sound. Oh, the subtleties ...

Regards,

Jon Page,   piano technician
Harwich Port, Cape Cod, Mass.
mailto:jonpage@attbi.com
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