Agree with many of the previous comments about learning to listen fast. That has helped me bunches. But I'm still not as fast as I should be. One thing that I haven't seen mentioned this time is the internal attitude that we can have while we're tuning. Not to get too David Andersen-ish (can ya feel da love, brutha?) ... for me, having the right mindset prior to beginning the tuning is critical. I am a good tuner, but when I doubt that, my time increases, and I'm constantly questioning whether I'm doing a good job. For instance, some of my best and most efficient tunings "happened" when I wasn't trying to accomplish a best and most efficient tuning. We've got to learn to get with it and tune -- because we are professionals, and we DO know how to tune. (Assuming we are actually competent, of course.) If we are constantly second-guessing ourselves and our tuning choices, we'll never get through with the tuning. But as Ron mentioned, we "throw" a tuning on the piano, more likely than not, it will be quite good. When I'm working on a known lower-class piano, I generally begin intentionally with the attitude that I will just tune this thing fast and get it over with. Often, the end-result tuning sounds really quite darn good. Better than it "should." So ... sometimes, if I'm feeling a little "off" internally, I'll sit down to a really nice piano and tell myself that it's just an unimportant hunk of junk ... tune it fast and get it over with. Turns out fine. After we've trained and trained and trained ourselves to learn how to tune by incessant repetition and prior head-scratching, sometimes we've got to let go of all that conscious effort and just do what we know how to do. Attitude, brutha, attitude. <G> Not a pompous attitude, but a competent attitude. -- JF -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101104/21b20bc4/attachment.htm>
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