Here's my problem: I play jazz at a number of locations, but I'm apparently very sensitive to an out of tune piano. It really takes a lot of enjoyment out of the experience for me, and I worry that the audience, although they may not notice that it is out of tune, will like the playing less. I need all the help I can get.

Here's a recording from a recent gig. The tuning isn't bad, but it bugs me:

http://www.box.com/s/0mejhiab8ti2ijqo9grz

So tell me what you think of this plan: I get some tips from my piano tuner friend, I buy a good set of tools. I either buy a junky piano or offer to tune people's junky pianos for free (I have a digital). After a few months I'm good enough to fix up unisons, etc. When a piano at a venue is bad, I touch it up for free.

I have a science/engineering background, and am retired with enough free time to learn this. One con is that there aren't many venues with pianos.

What do you think of this idea?

Tuning is a tar baby: very soon just touching up unisons will not be enough, the octaves and fifths will bother you, too.

So if you decide to learn to tune, realize you may get sucked in more than you think. For instance, I would be able to play much better than if I never learned to tune. Part of me is always listening to the tuning in a critical way. But no great loss. I doubt I would ever have been able to play really good.

That's how it started for me.



I started way too late to ever hope to be as good as I'd want, but good tones, in tune, make listening to myself tolerable. The greater joy is that a well-tuned and regulated piano sucks in guests who play while I enjoy listening over my after-dinner coffee.

I think it's a reasonable idea.

Here's a problem I see: Even if I found a free piano (pretty common around here), I called a moving company who quoted me a minimum of $345 to move it to my house (and I don't even have room here).

So bringing home an orphaned piano might not be part of the plan.

Touching up the tuning still involves many of the highest level of skills we use. Its more than just truing up a few stray unisons. (you still need to know which unison is correct and also tune for stability) I have a couple customers that do this, some times just hours before I come over to tune. They can get them pretty good but lack the experience to properly render the string and set the pin well. Instead of finding a stable note that is where it's supposed to be and leaving it alone, I have to mess it and retune it just to be sure it stays there.

The feedback we get from the pianos's state of tuning when we return to tune it is a valuable assesment of our skills at providing stability. I nearly lost my mind once trying to figure out why a piano sounded like crap 3 months after I tuned it. Asked the customer if someone else tuned it and he said no. I opened the piano bench to tighten the leg bolts and find a cheap gooseneck hammer stuffed in there amongst all the music books...lol. I'm sure some other tuners out there have similar experiences.

I've run into many trombonist/tuners. The listening skills you have developed are all you need to accomplish tunings of the highest level - provided you partner with a good electronic tuning device... Otherwise there is a steep learning curve to develop new temperament tuning skills. (I'd strongly suggest Verituner)

Just touching up unisons? Should be easy, with the challenge being physical manipulation of the string system to leave a stable note...

You may be able to find a local church with a piano hidden away in a basement that would make a good practice candidate.

Ron Koval

Ah, but a Verituner costs around $900, right? At that range, it would be cheaper to pay the venue to have the piano tuned several times.

Are there any tuners under $100 that would work? I would have expected that the accuracy of electronics is so much higher than necessary, that even cheap tuners would work. Sounds like I am wrong here.

If you just focus on unisons, you can avoid getting a machine. The challenge becomes just what to tune the unison to...

Best case: two strings agree and you pull the third in tune with them.

A little tougher: None of the three strings agree. Compare each with an octave and double octave to see which is the closest to pure. Match the others to that one.

Worse yet - none of the three match at all with the octave, or double or both... Time to call the tech!

Lots of modern gear and apps are precise enough to set pitch. The challenge comes from finding the accurate calculation to make the octaves on that particular piano match. Easier to do by ear, harder for the machines to determine. (That's the partnering part I wrote about above.)

I'd say practice only unisons - you will gain the tactile/listening skills needed if you decide to learn more in the future.

Ron Koval

Al, $345 sounds a little steep to me for a piano move. Try calling a piano/music retail store in your area and see where that leads - they may direct you to a guy that they use. I have found guys who do it in my area for around a 100 bucks. But be sure to tip 20/25 percent cash when the job's done (good karma).

Oh, and also it would be a good idea, before you go through the trouble and expense of having the piano moved, to have your tuner friend drive over with you to check out the piano and 'kick the tires'. Check soundboard, pinblock, etc.

-Erich

+1 RonTuner! That's exactly what I was thinking about learning unisons and different types and levels of problems that you will likely encounter with the piano at your gig. Good advice Ron.

Why not. Just get an experienced tuner to get you started so you don't damage the pins or the pin block.

TuneLab is software that is more reasonably priced. The iPhone version is $299.00. If you have a Windows Mobile device (up to 6.5) you can download the program for free. It's fully functional but periodicly stops for two minutes. I've been using it for quite a few years and it seems to me the learning curve on it is not too big of a deal. Verituner is, of course, excellent software but pretty pricey. Not that I mind spending money on the tools of the trade. I have a FUJAN tuning hammer that cost me over $400.00. I have another tuning program called TUNIC OnlyPure which was pretty expensive also, but how many programs do you need?

You know, Al, why not just try to tune by ear. You may have a natural knack for it. You can always get an ETD later if need be. Or if you find out that this is not what you want to do, you would not be out the expense. Unisons, like you are talking about, are not tuned with an ETD anyway.

One other thing. These unisons that bother you are probably out because of pin setting, not from mis-tuning or from temperature/humidity changes. A piano that has not been tuned for a while may sound "shimmery" because the unisons are not nice and clean. But if some are really obnoxious it was a pin setting problem. Put stability as a top priority.

Friendly advice from a former 'bone player.

You mean that the tuner didn't move the pins in a way that would keep them from shifting?

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Here's another question:

Looking at some videos and other sites (for example, this one), the software or hardware requires that you play certain notes, and then it determines the proper tuning for that piano.

I would have expected that for well-tempered tuning, there would be one and only one frequency that you should use for each note independent of what piano you are tuning. Am I wrong?

Thanks.

Yes, each piano has strings that have a unique "inharmonicity" - this is where the partials are not exact multiples of the fundamental due to stiffness of the strings. Since each piano is different, there is no one temperament that works for all. This is why the electronic tuning devices have a means to measure the inharmonicity and adapt the tuning. Aural tuners do the same thing by deciding which sets of partials to match at different points along the keyboard to give the best overall balance. Even with an ETD, a good aural sense is necessary as the final result has to sound good, no matter what the machine says (and some allow you to change which sets of partials to match to adapt the tuning curve).

Paul

Yes! But it isn't the pin that usually shifts, although some residual torque can relax. It is the tension in the non-speaking part that usually shifts. It all falls under what is merely called "pin setting".

Fascinating, I had no idea. Thanks for the clear explanations, Paul and Jeff.

Do a google search for Tunelab 97. It's less than $40 and does a pretty fair job, actually, excellent job. It's an older program, but works fine on my Vista laptop. Plus, you can try it before you buy it. Keep in mind what was mentioned before, you can get yourself in a bit of a sticky situation when you start tuning one or two notes. It can lead to having to retune the entire piano. Plus, tuning a piano for a non professional can take upwards of two hours or even more at the very beginning, and it's best to have a quiet atmosphere. That being said, do it - I highly recommend it. I tune my own piano and a few others, and it's a skill that I have never regretted acquiring. I'm at the level where I can make a piano sound very good, but not quite as good as a tip top pro. It's enough to make me happy though.

It took me 3-4 hours to tune a piano when I first started learning. I remember sitting in practice shacks at my university, hour after agonizing hour, tuning old pianos. Worst part is, I would realize (or my mentor would tell me) afterward that there were notes that still weren't right. On the positive side, though, that was only for the first few pianos - things very gradually got better. It's true, though, that it's hard to just do a few notes to make a piano sound better - unless there happen to be just a few unisons that are clearly worse than all the others.

I also second Tunelab Pro (http://www.tunelab-world.com/tlp.html) for a great starter program. It can do pretty much anything, even in the trial form, although it is not the most intuitive program ever created - it takes some reading to figure out how to set things up.

Bottom line: be careful, it's a slippery slope you're starting down! But well worth it.

Hey Al,

I want to encourage you in your endeavor! I think it's great you are learning to tune. As a piano player with a science and engineering background, you are already ahead of most technicians. Trust in yourself and your ear and just practice a little.

In regards to tuning structure, to keep it easy before a gig, focusing only on unisons (with a quick check on the upper and lower intervals to determine the most in-tune string of the trichord) is probably the best way to go.

One thing that isn't spoken of much in the technician community is integrity of tuning. Although it is possible to touch-up a tuning outside of unisons to try to make the piano sound cleaner, it is only a patchwork illusion that pleases the ear a little more. This is not the same thing as bringing a piano truly back into tune. Every note is a variable and dependent on its ideal alignment with all other notes. By pushing a note sharp or flat here or there to clean it up, you may be fixing the worst offending interval, but you are subtly changing its relationship with 87 other notes, all of which have new positions.

When a piano goes out of tune, it doesn't do so in a patterned fashion, with groups of notes rising sharp or falling flat by predictable amounts. Rather, all the notes drift differently in frequency by small amounts. So this creates an entirely new frequency pallet. It is now an entirely different tuning - one that cannot be fixed by moving a few. Often the movement is small, so the worst offenders can be fudged back into position to create the illusion of continuity, but the alignment and tuning is lost.

If you decide to move beyond unisons, I think it is really important to study the deeper practice of tuning - or just use a machine that has a good inharmonicity curve approximation. That way, you can set the pins properly - regarding the whole instrument - and not create too many discontinuities trying to fix a tuning that is unfixable.

All the best to you in your work!

One thing that an ETD allows you to do is record the tuning of a freshly tuned piano. That might allow you efficiently to clean up a piano like the one in your recording without doing a full-on tuning.

One thing to watch out for on other people's junky pianos: Breaking strings.

Look for rust, and a big red flag is a few shiny new strings. That means that the risk of more of the old ones breaking is high. The pro will come with an ample supply of replacement wire in all the many necessary gauges. The big wrapped bass strings are worse, they may have to be custom ordered.

Most important, always tripple check that you have the hammer on the right pin. That's a real easy way for beginners to break strings....

Well, guys, yesterday I got together with a piano tuner friend of mine, and he let me try tuning a few notes. What I learned:

Forget it, it's too hard!

He took a string and brought it sharp and then had me lower the pitch to get it in tune. I'd push and push on the lever, and nothing would happen, and then the lever would jump a bit, and it would go flat.

And I thought that adjusting the pitch with the lever was the easy part! He also instilled in me a fear of breaking strings.

So, my hat is off to you guys. Although I agree that this could be a rewarding thing to learn, my session yesterday showed me that I just don't have the time it would take to learn this skill.

Thanks for the update!

Tuning is very much a mechanical skill, and thats why the tuning lever is such an important tool. Changing tuning levers was traumatic for me.

This post should be fixed in place at the top of the Tuner/Tech FAQ forum.


Having said that, I remember having the same experience the first time I tried to tune a piano. And the second time and the third, until maybe the fortieth practice session. Ask any pro - after 25 years of doing this, we are still learning and improving. It's like a quest for the holy grail. (Unless you are one of those who know it all and have nothing more to learn - they are out there too, of course )