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A sibling comment mentioned that harpsichords tend to have wood frames, and so they are incredibly reactive to temperature and humidity. The pin blocks in harpsichords also are often a single piece of hardwood, while in a piano they are a laminate of specially selected quartersawn hardwoods, so they hold the tuning pins a lot more strongly. If you hire a piano tuner for your harpsichord, they also tend to torque the pins too hard, which weakens the pin block even more. Depending on the instrument and temperament, a tuning could be ~45 min or up to 90 min. Small instruments in the family (spinets and virginals) could have <4 octaves and one stop, meaning <50 strings to tune, and the biggest instrument had 5 stops and a 5-octave keyboard, meaning more strings than a piano (300 vs about 230). The "standard" instrument is ~4.5 octaves with 3 stops, meaning ~150 strings. The customer picks the temperament generally, and that has some effect on how long it takes. Quarter-comma tunings (4 fifths flat by a quarter of a comma, the rest remaining pure) like Werckmeister are the quickest, and took under an hour on the standard instrument, but tunings like Kellner (1/5th comma, but harder from an A reference) and Valloti (1/6th comma) took me at least 2 passes to touch up, so over an hour. I also did equal temperament tunings with a tuner, which are quick. For reference, it takes me about 90 minutes to 2 hours to do a piano, so I am a little slow by professional piano tuner standards, but harpsichords are definitely quicker. I also frequently adjusted the tuning based on what repertoire was being played, rotating it so that the near-pure thirds would be in the keys of the repertoire and possibly raising leading tones a bit. It was also not uncommon to have a modern woodwind in an ensemble, which often meant only doing a slightly spicy version of equal temperament rather than using a full-on baroque tuning. The harpsichords were pretty much all at schools - I started by tuning my school's instruments and expanded from there. I generally charged my hourly rate for 4 services/instrument/month + some padding, with extras (concerts) going at an hourly rate. This was a "work study" arrangement at my school (although I had 15 hours/week of work study for <3 hours of work, and still gave them a discount at the standard student rate) and contract work outside. |