🤖 Warning, warning! This is a long post!
I had a customer this week make a request of me. He sat at the piano, spread his arms over the keyboard and instructed me that he wanted every note to be perfectly in tune over the whole scale of the piano. It seemed as though this was a new idea to him. I thought at first maybe he was joking but I quickly stopped myself from laughing. I then asked him, "What is it you think I do?". He looked at me and said, "I have no idea!".
Now, some background. I've known this person for many years although not well. I've tuned various pianos for him, none of them were very nice and always needed pitch raises. The piano at his house that I tuned maybe three times, was a Wurlitzer spinet and it was usually in different houses (he moves a lot). He's probably about 60 years old and has played piano since his childhood. He's a very good player!
This particular piano I was tuning for him this week was a different one. It was his mothers and it's the one he played growing up. It's a 1968 Baldwin Acrosonic. This model is a little taller so it looks like a console but has the spinet action. It's in very good shape and, for an Acrosonic, has a nice sound and even though many of the hammers are sluggish, he LOVES the way it plays and feels. He's had it for 10 years or so and is just now having it tuned. I tuned it November 1, 2022 and did a pitch raise on it. Humidity was about 50% then. He played it after I was done and thought it sounded great. We've had a very strange winter here, as many places have. One day it's 5 degrees and the next day it's 60 degrees!! Just a roller-coaster. This time when I tuned it the humidity was 25%. So, no surprise at all that it was out of tune!
We talked for a bit, and I explained some things about piano tuning like unisons and how we work to get "every note perfectly in tune", at least with itself. He then wanted to go over the lowest single bass strings. Most of them sounded fine to him except, if I remember correctly, the F# octave. He wanted it tuned much lower. It was really beating! But, as I told him, you're the one who has to hear it. He played the piano and seemed satisfied with it and honestly I felt I did a fabulous job on it. If that tuning hadn't satisfied him, I'm not sure what I would have done.
For some reason I'm having a hard time letting this go. Being instructed that he wanted, "Every note perfectly in tune." and feeling he needed to tell me that, keeps going through my head. And the person saying it, having no idea what he's talking about! Maybe he actually does know what he's talking about but didn't want to say, "Every tuning you've done for me sucked!"
There is one more detail. His church had a used Yamaha grand recently donated to them and my tunings on it have been just great. He loves how it sounds!
I know there is no answer to this situation but it felt good to write it out to people who would understand. Thanks for listening!
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"That Tuning Guy"
Scott Kerns
Lincoln, Nebraska
www.thattuningguy.com------------------------------