for those on the fence about hearing protection..

[Don]

Hi Ron,

You could hit them..or you could control the humidity. I do agree the piano
must be stabilized--but as you point out--that can be done with very few
strong blows. I prefer to control humidity.

At 11:40 AM 3/24/2008 -0600, you wrote:
>
>The point I've tried to make for many years, still 
>unsuccessfully, is that the problem isn't necessarily at the V 
>bar, as is almost universally assumed. When we get instant 
>aural (or visual) verification of change with any pin 
>movement, then test blows are redundant if we have any idea 
>what we're doing with the tuning hammer - if it's coming from 
>the V bar. Tune a string in the capo section, using light 
>blows. Get it where you want it, and where it stays there 
>through a few more light blows. Then whack it. Depending on 
>the severity and direction of humidity swings the piano had 
>been through since you last tuned it, and how far you moved 
>the string to tune it this time, it will either not change 
>perceptibly, or drop anywhere from just detectable, to 4+ 
>beats. Unless we're hopelessly incompetent with a tuning 
>hammer, that pitch drop didn't come from the V bar. It came 
>through the bridge. Now, tune the string again, using the same 
>soft blows as the first time. Get it where you want it, and 
>whack it again. What happens? It stays put, if you know how to 
>run the hammer. If we couldn't stabilize the string with soft 
>blows the first time, why could we the second? Try it on the 
>next string (next note). You'll likely get a similar effect. 
>Did you forget how to run the hammer since the second pass on 
>that last string. No, of course not. You just didn't hit it 
>hard enough, at least once, to find out if it would render 
>through the bridge before you quit tuning it. On the third 
>string (next note), don't touch the pin at all. Note where the 
>pitch is, and whack it. If the other two strings dropped in 
>pitch, this one likely will too, and you hadn't laid hammer to 
>it yet, so you can't blame hammer technique.
>
>Continual pounding will cause a string to creep sharp when we 
>quit and come back to check in a minute or so. This, I think, 
>comes from the V bar because we weren't getting an accurate 
>representation of what we had when we left it. So it's 
>possible to pound too hard as well as not hard enough.
>
>It's a combination of things. The people who say you can tune 
>softly with stability with just good hammer technique are 
>either tuning pianos who's MC hasn't changed at all since they 
>last tuned it, and they're making one cent revisions, or they 
>aren't aware of how lousy their tunings sound the week after 
>they did them. Aside from the unusually inept "tooner", 
>virtually all of the tuners I've followed from one to three 
>weeks after their efforts has been a "don't have to hit 'em to 
>get 'em stable" practitioner. If you're tuning in real world 
>climate conditions, you *do* have to    hit 'em enough, at 
>least once, to find out what slack the back scale has to give 
>you. Then you adjust your approach to what the piano tells you 
>is necessary.
>
>
>> I recently tuned a church grand in which, before tuning, I could mute 
>> off a string in the octave 7 region, and knock it 3 to 8 cents flat with 
>> just one moderate test blow (not pounding, but about as hard as I might 
>> actually strike a key when playing my favorite Liszt Etude). The 
>> previous tuner might suggest I play too hard, but I would say he did not 
>> use firm enough test blows, and got lucky that nobody played it hard 
>> enough to cause a problem.
>
>I have pianos that do the same thing. Since I'm the previous 
>tuner, I know it wasn't the last guy not hitting them hard 
>enough. The pianos I find this in have typically gone through 
>40%+ humidity swings between tunings. These same pianos, tuned 
>again in the same season a couple of months later (wedding 
>funeral, etc), don't do this. Tuned again at their regularly 
>scheduled time, they do. When I follow someone a week of 
>stable weather after he tuned it and can do this, it's not 
>humidity.
>Ron N
>
>
>-- 
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6:50 PM
>
>
Regards,
Don Rose, B.Mus., A.M.U.S., A.MUS., R.P.T.
Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat

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