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I kind of figured as much RXD. Retired, semi retired, not working hard, not tuning for homes etc., with you...

I wasn't spoiled. I had to work my tail off to get myself where I am at today. Anyone that has done that should be proud of themselves, including you in your other ventures.

This is the best part of Europe. My cousin and I sat in Cambridge England one Friday night, wondering what to do for the weekend. We decided to visit Paris. We found a cheap flight out Sat morning, stayed in a hotel right by the museums. We saw the Mona Lisa, and other landmarks, drank some great wine, ate some great pastries, and flew back to England Sunday evening.

Sorry, I missed thIs one.

Retired?, Good heavens no. I must have casually ambled through 35-40 tunings last week, most of them on an all night session I pulled yet i still had a 3-4 days to myself.

Let me explain, The trick is this, selecting the kind of work I like to do. I now never tune a piano that hasn't been seen by me, one of my assistants or colleagues sometime during the last few days. Sometimes seen during the last few hours.

Having the diagnostic skills to spot a potential problem and deal with it while it is still small so there is never accumulation of error, (this harks back to including anything necessary in a tuning). And staying on top of the job.

You mention pride. Well, I never let anybody get the idea that I am the only one that can tune their piano. Gratifying as it is, for me to be the only one when they want me, drastically interferes with my freedom. there are only 3-4 people that I allow to think this way and that's for purely political reasons.

I have never inherited any tunings. Quite the opposite , because of my love of travel and new places, I have set up a tuning business from scratch 5 times, so far. Sometimes I have sold the business, most often I have continued my phone line for 12 months after I leave an area with the numbers of the tuners I have shared work with and befriended. It's never about money, that looks after itself.

This morning, between tunings, I walked past a line of people halfway round the block for a special exhibition in an art gallery. I casually ambled in there Thursday morning and had the place almost to myself. Give me them unsocial hours anytime.

Anyway, over the years I have learned to work smart, not hard. Ditch digging is hard work, piano work isn't. I do, however, do a lot of work but the concept of putting in the hours is foreign to me.

I simply took the road less travelled. Anyone can do it.

Here is the thing, Before the economy tanked not many consumers were really doing their homework on what anything was really costing them but today that has changed and not just merely changed but people are smarter when it comes to being duped or up - sold things they don't need.

I can tell you this. I personally have been to court with state officials who wanted to regulate my prices as in doubling them and charging me tax on services that we have never charged for. They wanted to send appraisers in here to tell me what to charge for used pianos and services. Well they are now funding my retirement plan when they lost that case.... very badly.

I give it another 5 years and you will see state regulated pricing on all used merchandise sold by dealers and services. When we owned our Moving agency in Michigan it was heavily regulated and we were only allowed to be about 10 dollars cheaper than any other moving business. If we wanted to change toilet paper brands we almost had to get permission from Lansing,

I'd say what you are paying for a tuning depends on what they are doing and how thorough they are. If you are watching a supposedly experienced tuner doing his work and you go in there and he has a subway sandwich laid out on your keyboard and charging you 95 dollars an hour then I would be questioning that.

In my area 80 - 150 depending on what is involved. If they whip out an I phone with a tuning app I would be scared though

Don't know about being scared if someone shows up with a tuning app. I'm tuning for a high end piano store, tuning big money grands and have nothing but rave reviews and requests to tune at other stores as well as in home tunings. I use nothing but Tunelabs. Of course, I program in the IH turn solid unisons and set the pin.

How in the world could the state regulate pricing on all used merchandise? If I owned a trucking company, I'd be $10.00 more expensive, and blow the competition out of the water with better service. Better service beats a lower price over the long term.

Oh....and those funny things called ETD's don't scare me much either.........just like a tuning fork, they are a good tool in the right hands.

Then you are not listening to the sympathetic resonance of the piano while you tune , are you ? ETD can provide you a perfect smoothing of the tuning curve at a given partial level
Tuning by ear only is a really different thing in the end,(in my experience) because you allow yourself more pleasure and have a more resonant/sonorous instrument in the end.

The model in the end will be " a hair" different, I believe because you hardly can listen to intervals and tune with ETD at the same time, (auto recognize note mode) you are obliged to trust the ETD.

I also suggest that temperature changes are not detected by the EDT, and can happen during the curse of a tuning.

THank you

I have had a similar experience with Tunelab (using the iPhone app). I am not a "veteran" tuner by any means, I've only been doing this about five years now, but have had "rave" reviews too. I now have a database of several hundred customers, 100% of them have been pleased with my tunings. The owner of the local music store (who have been in business since the 1940's) has used several technicians over the years. After he had me come in to tune a couple of pianos for him, he told me that he really liked the way I tuned and he would only be using me form here on out.

There is a term in the computer world, "garbage in, garbage out" If you don't thoroughly read the manual and understand exactly how the software works, then yes, you will have mistakes in your tunings. However if you follow the directions and know how to "tweak" the program you will get excellent and consistent results.

Case in point... A local church started using me a couple of years ago. Their previous tech tried to tune by ear, but was not very good at it. They called me in for a second opinion. I have been servicing their piano ever since. On two different occasions while I was at the church tuning the piano, one of the pianists thanked me for doing such a good job. He said, "The thing I love about your tunings is that they are consistently good." Just the other day, while tuning the piano, another one of the musicians there saw that I was using my phone to tune and said, "Thank you for using that!"

Only if you have a musical ear, you can adjust an ETD curve,

And then other things may arise, as partials that are not exactly at the same pitch that expected.

A friend that tune with ETD because it get no particular reflex ions in the end, tells me he know he would tune otherwise but as he discovered the ETD provide an acceptable tuning it is easier for him to use it.

What I recall is that at the end of the tuning you have the surprise : is the piano sounding nice ?

I hate that distance it installs between the piano and us

(but it is an excellent backup tool for special situations)

Absolutely, is the piano sounding nice? Oleck, I tune more by ear than with an ETD - so for me, an ETD is just one of my tools. I quickly learned when tuning an entire piano with ETD to check things as I went along, to avoid the "end of tuning surprise". Tunelab does a really good job on raising pitch via overpull. That's the feature I use most. Once overpulled, I go over the piano by ear.

Tuning by ear only is a really different thing in the end,(in my experience) because you allow yourself more pleasure and have a more resonant/sonorous instrument in the end.
The model in the end will be " a hair" different, I believe because you hardly can listen to intervals and tune with ETD at the same time, (auto recognize note mode) you are obliged to trust the ETD.
I also suggest that temperature changes are not detected by the EDT, and can happen during the curse of a tuning.
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Greetings,
I am curious how the strictly aural tuner deals with a piano that is 3 cents flat in one section, 5 cents in another, and dead on in another. My ETD allows me to make the fractions of a cent correction as I progress. Is your ear able to progressively tune .3 and .6 cent corrections as you go? I have never seen a tech that was able to do this.

I have used a ETD tuning for years. Artists from John Browning to Renee Fleming, and numerous others have commented on how resonant the piano was. The same ETD has carried me through decades of major recording studio work at the highest prices in this town with excellent reviews.
I was trained by Bill Garlick, and he and I both thought my aural tuning was capable of meeting the demands of the most stringent customers in the world, and he was right. That said, after 17 years of aurally tuning, the ETD made me a better tuner, simply because it can correct off-pitch beginnings as I progress through the scale instead of tuning every piano twice to hit the performance level.
The machine is a tool, and used by a hack it is only marginally effective. Used with experience and knowledge, I think it will produce a superior tuning to the ear 99% of the time. There are very few that inhabit that last 1%.
Regards,

I've had nothing but great response using Tunelabs but I do understand how someone would be inclined to continue with the aural method and prefer it. The learning curve is harder and longer, no pun intended, than using a device and it's a small crowd that can do this.

And probably, the tuning can be more natural or inclined for each piano.

It's hard to want to learn the aural method when one is getting smiles all the time from customers but I do intend to learn it slowly over time as it is a respected skill.

I use an ETD some of the time also. However tune aurally some also as not to get "rusty". My reasoning is from a business standpoint I know electronics fail. I can't imagine it would look to professional to show up to a clients home or a concert tuning and not be able to tune their instrument because your ETD fizzles out. As far as which sounds better, it's all in the "ear" of the beholder.

I agree with you, pianotune,

What I noticed is that the machione driven tuning modify slightly the way you install justness, and in the end the way you listen.
Possibly because for instance the 3d partial is used for the display, one tend to grasp on it more than usual.
This is a very thin effect, indeed in the end the progressiveness can be very good, but I feel that the "consonance" job, is not taken in account as much as with aural tuning.

AT worst I could say that the etd make too much compromising;
The tuning gets "perfectly" even and sound just of course, but I feel the type of justness lacks a little "meaning" .

Yes it is a big help to check the drift or evolving of a piano, while the FBI gives you similar information (as the octave quality, and many other tests)

The problem in aural tuning is that it is easy to obtain some unbalance at some point, due to spectra change or more or less rich notes, then it is reflected to the top if not detected soon enough.
But the level of "impreciseness " I could measure in concert tunings (that where mostly due to the use of slow beating intervals consonance in priority to FBI progressiveness) where really low , around 1-2cts not really much more . (and there where 2 ETD users and 4 aural only , so the tunings in the end where a mix of both approaches)

But there was a clear choice for one kind of interval, not tweaking them much in order to keep a FBI progression even.

Some other tuners used all FBI tuning generally more enlaged than what the ETD propose as a medium tuning.

the fact is that someone robbed my ETD at some point, then I discovered I did not need it, I could do a faster job without it, and have more pleasure.

but it helped me to obtain very minimal pitch increments, some of them barely noticeable by ear.

The fact one cannot really use checks while tuning with an ETD is what annoyed me the most.

A Client with a Steinway 45 wanted an electronic tuning. He said the last tuner forgot his ETD, and tuned the piano by ear, and he didn't like the result. I found an inaccurate temperament, so the last guy didn't know how to tune by ear, and normally relied on his ETD. He was out of his comfort zone without an ETD. That's the danger of relying on an ETD.

There is nothing inherant in the ETD itself which prevents a tech from doing checks. I do hybrid tuning and most aural tuners who have picked up an ETD to help them in their work do the same. The ETD's work so well that you only need to run checks and small adjustments when the piano is near finished.

One of the best advantages of the ETD is to allow total freedom to initially tune whatever note one wants to without relying on other notes to be tuned to do so. The ETD will also prevent compound errors from occuring as the base referance does not shift as the soundboard gets loaded. You can load the structure with tension in the best possible way, either for safety, or to bring worse sections up to reasonable tension before continuing. This would be in cases where a full pitch raising cycle is not warranted.

Yes Emmery there are som advantages, (and if you maintain a lot of pianos you can raise the stability faster possibly) but you don't go "within" the piano justness as when tuning aurally (the small moment where you take the measure of the sound the piano can produce, and tune accordingly)

SO I always have felt that I had top please the piano on one side, and the ETD on the other, and sometime it is in contradiction .

You may have seen me with the VT100 located far from me, so not to fight too much together