The other day I had a customer who tried to tune his old Blüthner grand. It was a desaster. But fortunately no string broke, even when some strings were 20 cents sharp (and others 40 cents flat!). Remember your own first attempts to tune a piano. How long did it take and how hard seemed that? In hindsight I can´t believe that my first tuning took me more than 8 hours (by ear). But I get reminded to these attempts because I have an "apprentice" now. She is a good friend of mine who wants to learn tuning and some other things about piano repair. I show her how to tune with ETD and by ear and it´s very hard for her. But she plays guitar too and so she is used to tune by beats. Therefore she does a good job with the unisons. She comes one day a week and I allways let her tune a temperament by ear and then she checks with verituner. Very frustating! Then I let her tune unisons. Last week she made a complete pitch raise with verituner and it took her 5 hours. That would I call some kind of success :-) But it´s a long way to go. I am happy that´s possible nowadays to do an excelent tuning with ETD. But it´s necessary that one knows what he is doing. Customers usually don´t know. Gregor Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:15:43 -0500 From: paul at bruesch.net To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: [pianotech] DIY tuning Going to tune a spinet tomorrow. Customer says it has "one wire broken, A below middle C..." Chatted a bit more, then she says "I tried to tune it myself." Me: "Is that how the string broke?" Her: "Yes. It didn't look that hard, but I guess it is. I got the tool from my son." (Well good, I was imagining her using a 6" Crescent!) So I'm curious... how often has anyone come across this? It's a first for me in my not-so-many years of tuning. Paul Bruesch Stillwater, MN _________________________________________________________________ Share your memories online with anyone you want. http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/windows/windowslive/products/photos-share.aspx?tab=1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090721/78a5f349/attachment.htm>
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