Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum tune your piano by yourself!

oh please

Well, I think that musicians should know what tuning is. However, you are not going to learn that from an electronic tuner. Electronic tuners do not tune, they only set frequencies.

I'm not mechanically inclined and don't think that my ear would be good enough to tune even with much practice. From the little I've read about it it seems very complex(although I was a math teacher before retiring). I've read somewhere that it takes 1000 tunings to become reasonably good, so even if I had more mechanical/aural skills I would never consider tuning my piano.

Yep, it's incredibly complex. You get this wrench. You plonk it on the pin, and you give it a bit of a twist.

You also get to shove some rubber between some strings.

You do this really badly 999 times and then "POW" it's there.

Come on. You have managed to do nearly 12,000 posts here. You are apparently a retired maths teacher. You can risk a little twist on a tuning pin one day.

Live a little. Stretch a bit of wire.

Hi:

I disagree with this. Depends on the tuner and their technique.
You can do a solid tuning with no pounding, or an unstable tuning with a lot of pounding.

There are those who have two ways of doing a job. Their way, or the wrong way. There are others who can see many ways of achieving a goal.

Take care,

Steve

There must be a secret here somewhere! My self tuned unisons last about the same length of time as it took to get the three strings into unison in the first place!

If it's so easy why does it take 1000 tunings or four years?

it doesn't, it is just another myth. You know, people love myths because they are lazy. It is so easy and convinient to say: "it can't be done, you have to be trained professional etc etc"

I would never attempt to replicate or replace what my tuner does, but I wouldn't mind learning a bit of touch-up. Seems like there are always those one or two notes that go noticeably sour before the tuner's next servicing.

But better safe than sorry. Unless my tuner agrees and shows me how, don't think I'll bother.

Well, I see this thread is not done yet… in fact, it is just getting started. Who knows where it will end, or how many feathers will be ruffled in the process.

I will say, however, that I have enjoyed learning to tune and service my pianos as much as I’ve enjoyed learning to play. Fact is, I own two tuning hammers!

To me, the most difficult part is learning to tune the unisons to sound pure. The ETD can help you set the temperament and the pitch of a certain note. However, getting the unisons right and stable is the real challenge. Heck, it’s all a challenge!

Tuning is actually the easiest part (once you learn proper tuning hammer technique). Regulating and voicing is a whole new ballgame. One thing is for sure, you tend to develop an appreciation for the real piano techs when you try it yourself. My hat is off to the fine piano techs here on this forum, and else ware, that are good at their craft; there is no substitute for years of training and experience.

And, to BDB… no, the first time I tuned my piano, it didn’t sound great, but it sounded a heck of lot better than it did when it was way out of tune!

Happy Holidays!

Rick

Each time you do it, you get better. You get better results, and you get better at appreciating the results.

The other thing to consider is that there is a big advantage to tuning the same piano over and over. One of the big challenges of being a professional technician is that so many pianos tune differently - some, like many Yamaha pianos, tune very readily, while others can be next to impossible! Its similar to playing piano: I have friends who have pianos that I think are really hard to play and control, yet when they play it, the sound is wonderful! They know every nuance of the instrument and can make it do what they want!

So part of whether tuning your piano is practical partly depends on how easy your piano is to tune. It also depends on how much you enjoy DIY projects. It also depends on your expectations,sensitivities, aptitude, etc.

For me, I found learning to tune at a professional level to be one of the most difficult challenges ever! But I'm not a quick learner. Getting through a whole piano was so exhausting at first. It was a real breakthrough when I could get the process down to 4 hours.

I wish all my clients could pretune the piano for me! Then I could come in and refine it and have time left for voicing and regulating, which I find more satisfying. After all, I'd rather play a well-voiced, well-regulated, but a little out-of-tune piano than a perfectly tuned piano with mediocre touch and tone.

Because I have to play several pianos between my schools, church and home, I bought a tuning hammer, mutes, and a Seiko tuner. I would NEVER dream of tuning the whole piano but I have used it to clean up some unisons that were annoying. Setting temperament is somthing above my pay grade. I do respect my techs and appreciate that great job they do.

of tuning your piano was easy there wouldn't be any professional piano tuners

There are a lot of of professional dog washers. Does that mean washing dogs is an arcane art only to passed down by the keepers of the secrets?


All joking aside, I don't think it's easy but I also don't think all the FU&D really helps anyone at all. Arm yourself with some knowledge; maybe try to get some mentoring, go slowly and be ready to accept whatever havok you reap. When the time is right, I'll do my learning on a 70's story and clark console (from my MIL's house) that's not worth paying someone to haul away. Till then, it's good bye $115 and hello sweet sounding piano.

Kurt

Bad example. Ask any top notch technician/tuner. They will tell you that the unison is the hardest interval to tune properly.

I'm not saying that is wrong, but I am curious why, as it is not my experience at all. Doing unisons is the first thing most of us amateur tuners try as it is reasonably straightforward to isolate the offending string. I found fixing unisons helped me to develop proper hammer technique and got my ear used to listening for the beats before the more challenging aural requirements of a full tuning.

exactly my experience as well.


Anyway think that the main reason people think is so difficult because piano has so many keys. If piano had only one octave nobody would call a tuner to it. Same principles apply here as with eating an elephant, how? piece by piece.

To me, a truly perfect unison is difficult to achieve and takes the most effort. When tuning any other intervals, there is some wiggle room for subjective analysis of the two notes and how they blend. Tuning the unisons on the same note is not as forgiving. Even though perfection or absolutes are mostly theoretical, you can tell if a note is not clean and pure. That subtle “cats meow” will let you know that the unison is not just right. Also, if the unison is not right, you can hear subtle rings, zings, busses and other unwanted nuances.

As a side note, (both literally and figuratively ) if the hammer to string alignment is not right, you will get the unwanted sizzles, pings, rattles, buzzes and fuzziness on the unison no matter how close they are to equal pitch.

There is nothing that sounds better than a clean, pure unison and achieving that goal is not so easy.

Rick

Old piano tuner saying:

"Unisons: First to learn, last to master."

Tuning unisons is a lot like target practice. The first trick is to just hit the target! Then with some practice you start getting closer to the bullseye. A professional tuner gets good at hitting the bullseye on every note!

It's not too hard to tune a unison within a 2 cent tolerance. At A4 that would be about half a beat. To a forgiving ear this might even sound tolerable. Tuning within a one cent tolerance is considerably harder. This is the standard for the PTG tuning exam. It may be acceptable to most listeners, but not for discriminating types. Half a cent gets into the area where the unison will start to sound "dead on".

In fact, inconsistencies in piano tone, the ETD, room acoustics, and measuring discrepancies make it very difficult to consistently measure piano strings much under half a cent. I'm speaking from the experience in having participated in administration of dozens of tuning exams.

Accuracy aside, the other equally, if not more important factor is stability of the unisons. Achieving a stable unison is much more challenging than achieving an accurate unison. But again, this is more of an issue for a professional, and less so for a DIYer. The DIY tuner has the luxury of being able to touch up the tuning on their piano every day if they like. A professional needs the unisons to last if they are going to gain a good reputation.