Steinway vs. The Tuner, Round One

[Farrell]

Gosh, I'm not Mr. Experience, and unfortunately, tuning is not likely my best talent, BUT Mr. Potter did teach me a thing or two also.

I just tuned an "L" last Friday. It had pretty tight pins also. I tune them pretty much like any other piano, except when you pull the string above pitch - just like with other pianos you want to feel/hear that little click that says that the pin moved a hair - in you are watching the pitch display on an ETD, you will see that you may be pulling the pitch easily 20 to 40 cents sharp - just to get that slight tiny movement of the tuning pin. As soon as you feel that little movement, you can back off and kinda wiggle the pin to be sure you don't have it un-naturally torqued, and the pitch will fall right back down. In practice it is a very fast thing you are doing, but you do hear the pitch go way up for that second while you are getting the pin to move that teeny bit. And it is really weird how easy it is to estimate how far to pull after a few pins - you might be pulling them 25 cents sharp for that second, but it settles right back down and your net movement can easily be a cent or less on a nice block.

I always do lots of wiggling of the pins (actually jiggling of the tuning lever) on these to be sure that the pins are relaxed (not torqued one way or another). I seem to have generally good results. It still can be a bit frustrating though.

And hey, I'm right there with you on S&S. Owned one. Now I know.

Terry Farrell
  
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alan R. Barnard" <mathstar@salemnet.com>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2002 8:15 PM
Subject: Steinway vs. The Tuner, Round One


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 ...