I heard this once, at a wedding, except it was a harp. My brother’s wife got one of her friends to play harp and she used a digital tuner on it and it came out pretty much characterless. She was a good harpist, too, just I would have preferred a more Baroque-sounding instrument than the synthesizer-like perfection that ensued.
I’ve used TuneLabs, which is a great program. It even measures the inharmonicity of your piano, to adjust how it tunes.
But it doesn’t include the skill required to do a good job. Ignoring the “soul” question, even if it had the perfect tuning curve for your piano, using the tuning hammer to tune the notes and to get all three strings for each note tuned together takes a fair bit of skill that takes time to develop. What’s worse, us amateur tuners work those tuning pins a lot more than a pro would (since we miss a lot and retry), making our pinblocks wear out way faster. For a decent new grand piano, it’s cheaper to use a pro than to DIY, taking wear and tear and the resultant devaulation into account.
There’s also a lot more to maintaining a piano than tuning it, including voicing and action work, among other things.
What were we talking about? Oh yeah. Never mind!
And yet, for almost all other instruments, anyone who can play it capably can also tune it capably. Why is there so much less skill needed to tune, say, a guitar than a piano? Or are all of the guitar players of the world unknowingly playing soulless instruments?
[QUOTE=Chronos]
Why is there so much less skill needed to tune, say, a guitar than a piano?
[/QUOTE]
A basic guitar has six strings, but a piano has around 230.
In addition, guitarists who want well-regulated instruments periodically take their guitars to a technician for action and intonation adjustments. As with piano tuning, you can learn to do it yourself, but a good pro generally does a noticeably better job. Having done my own guitar action & intonation, as well as some piano tuning and piano action restoration, the guitar is a lot simpler and easier.
A good piano tuner does more than just tune the instrument.
A soft-hearted Prime Minister? What’s a PM?
Probably a Program Manager.
-D/a
No, it is a Project Manager in that context.
This is fascinating.
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Either of you would flunk an interview depending on which kind of interviewer/position you were seeking.
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It’s interesting to ask for what professional interview, to which job, would all these (and other) wildly disparate approaches be considered worthy of?
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Chronos, could you step through your answers/chain of thought?
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Speaking of disparate, I’d like to see–perhaps as a contest–how many weird and wildly different “knowledge points”/individual links on a chain of thought can be strung together to get to an answer.
Sort of Rube-Goldberg fuzzy logic.
So, how would you?
For time pieces in the Bay Area, I’d ask for clarification for what constitutes a “timepiece”, then estimate how many each person has, then multiply by an estimate of the number of people in the Bay Area. That’s a pretty short one, really. The planes in flight, I’d have to give more thought.
Sure, though I’m feeling to lazy right now to actually do the calculations. The Sun’s Schwarzschild radius is 3 km, and is equal to 2Gm/c^2, so I can get the mass of the Sun (which is close to all hydrogen). Over its lifetime, about 10% of that hydrogen will be fused: So 10% of my previous number is the amount of fuel available. I know that in hydrogen fusion, about 0.7% of the mass is released, and I know E = mc^2, so now I know the amount of energy the Sun releases over its lifespan. That lifespan is 10 billion years, so divide that energy by 10 billion years, and I have the Sun’s total power. Distribute that power over a sphere 300 million kilometers in radius, and I have the intensity at the Earth.
What’s the 300 million kilometers?
The distance from the Sun to the Earth.
See, I was somewhat vindicated by asking what is a “piano tuner” – just take what you know, flash some normal-distribution numbers out of your ass, and make some basic calculations.
That’s why I said this was a bad question – just take people in Manhattan, say, and something you got out of Time magazine about piano-owning “households,” and just do the math out loud.
Better to ask a real question, if I were interviewing (which I probably will never be) with some meaningful citeria and judge how calm the pigeon stayed on mark when making the trivial calculations in his or her head.