Tuning Stabilty Question

[David Vanderhoofven]

Hi Robert,

Under such circumstances, I might recommend that the pianos could be tuned 
on a daily basis (if time and budget allow).  Given conditions including 
extremely heavy constant use, and air Conditioning cycling on and off, the 
pianos probably did well.  I would expect the pianos to go out of tune in a 
short period of time considering the heavy use.

How big of a pitch change did you make when you tuned the pianos?  Where 
you able to do several tunings to help stabilize the tunings?

Bless you for running the competition!  I am sure it was a lot of hard 
work.  May I suggest that for the next competition you might see if you can 
raise more money to pay a piano technician to do an extra tuning or two on 
the practice pianos.

Sincerely,
David Vanderhoofven
Joplin, MO

At 12:26 PM 7/4/2005, you wrote:
>I would like to ask your opinion about piano tuning stability. Last 
>weekend we finished our international piano competition in Boston. It 
>began on Wednesday June 22nd. I was the director of the competition and 
>had a lot of administrative work to do.
>
>A couple of weekends before the competition I made several visits to the 
>college and tuned four of the practice pianos, because last time in 2003 
>they were badly out of tune. They hadn't been tuned since January, the 
>beginning of the semester, and I thought I would save our organization 
>some money.
>
>The pianos were very old (looked as if they were from the early 1900s), 
>and consisted of two Steinway Bs, a Steinway A, and  a Baldwin Hamilton 
>Studio console.  They didn't seem to have been looked after very well. 
>There were paper clips, pins, dust and other debris inside. Some of the 
>tuning pins were rather loose. The music stand on a Steinway B was broken 
>and in terrible shape.
>
>I used the SAT III to  to tune them. I applied strong blows to equalize 
>the tension in the strings, and lighter listening blows to check the 
>resultant tuning. When I finished each piano, there was a very big 
>improvement, and I could have given a recital on each of them. The notes 
>had a bell like clarity, although the tone of the Baldwin upright was 
>rather mediocre.
>
>During the competition, the practice pianos were in use from 8 am until 11 
>pm each day by contestants. They practiced such things as the Prokofiev 
>Toccata, Rachmaninoff Etudes, Liszt etc, and they began to go out of tune. 
>The air conditioning in the building cycled on and off during the night 
>and day. They were in quite out of tune by the end of the competition.
>
>My question is, would you typically expect pianos to go out of tune under 
>these circumstances or should they have held their tuning better? I know 
>it is difficult to say without seeing the pianos, but I just wondered what 
>your opinion might be.  I'm not sure what else I could have done to make 
>the pianos hold their tuning longer. I couldn't go in to re-tune them 
>because they were constantly in use by the contestants from morning to 
>late at night. I was also overloaded with work, running the competition, 
>so I wouldn't have had the time anyway.
>
>Thanks for your thoughts and a happy July 4th.
>
>Robert Finley