transpsych Any piano tech worth their salt, will tell you it takes 100-200 practice tunings to get it under you belt.
That's as silly a statement as "it takes a minimum of 10 years of experience after 3 years of apprenticeship to become a decent concert technician." Turns out that all the concert technicians I spoke to came up with the same number when I asked them how much of these 10 years of experience consisted of lonely time at the piano with Trial&Error as the only procedure to go along with.
Guess what: The number was between 75-80%, which translates to 75-80% of a waste of time. With a real teacher who knows what he's doing, this waste of time can pretty much be eliminated. Case in point: My technician taught his son for three years on a daily basis, making sure that he never spent time working on a piano unsupervised. That way he could make sure that no bad habits would be burnt into his brain and Trial&Error would never have been an option.
His son is 24 now, technical director of Kawai in France and very much sought after as a concert technician by other manufacturers such as Bechstein.
So, the purported number of 100-200 necessary practice tunings is wrong as well. The number may be way too low if you don't know what you're doing and have no one to show you, but in my "experience", it's way too high if you do it right. In the past 5 years since I started tuning pianos, I have less than 100 tunings under my belt, but I have yet to break a string and the pianos I tune usually are concert grands or semi concert grands and not only my own ones, but also those from other owners who used to be unhappy with their current tuner..