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Why It's Impossible to Tune a Piano AKA - Why you should be nice to your piano tuner, he/she is doing the best they can.
I've often tried to explain to my piano tuning customers the challenges involved in orchestrating a really good tuning.
They usually end up with a glazed look in their eyes and just nod.
Sometimes I think they wonder if I'm just making excuses ahead of time in case my tuning doesn't sound good enough.
This is as good as any explanation I've seen, and much better than mine :-) You don't need to be a piano tuner to follow this (then again I know some tuners who may have trouble following it).
Having some basic knowledge of music will help, not to mention some math skills (which leaves me out). But regardless just the fact that you are here on Piano World tells me you will get something out of it.
My Keyboards: Estonia L-190, Roland RD88, Yamaha P-80, Bilhorn Telescope Organ c 1880, Antique Pump Organ, 1850 concertina, 3 other digital pianos ------------------------- My original piece on BandCamp: https://frankbaxtermrpianoworld.bandcamp.com/releases
Me banging out some tunes in the Estonia piano booth at the NAMM show...
The best tuning I have ever heard is when Sally Phillips tuned my Yamaha C7. The octaves were very pure and clean. Not a lot of stretch. Sally said pianos do not need a lot of stretch, particularly for classical music. Her temperament was superb.
I use tunelab pro downloaded to my lab-top PC, which I've used for several years. I only tune my own pianos, though I have tuned several pianos for others for free. I've never charged a dime to tune someone else' piano; but my time is so limited, I can't continue doing that, unless it is a good friend or relative.
My tunings sound good to me, but Sally's sounded much better. It just goes to show the difference between an amateur and a pro. But my tunings on my own pianos are better than having my pianos out of tune.
I can see where it would take a lot of time, practice and experience to be really good at it. And, even at that, I'm sure good piano tuners can't please every customer.
In my opinion, a good piano tuner earns their money...
Just my .02.
Rick
Piano enthusiast and amateur musician: "Treat others the way you would like to be treated". Yamaha C7. YouTube Channel
I have tuned two piano's in my time both took an exceedingly long amount of time to do and as I had no experience I bought a tuning wrench of amazon and went at it.
I found the easiest way (for me a non professional tuner) was to tune each of the 3 wires per note individually. I used a toothpick to pluck them and an electric tuner.
Both pianos were in really bad shape as I got them for free of the internet and after "Restoring" them to a sellable standard I sold them. Which led to a very funny situation of me nearly dropping one through a neighbours front window whilst I was moving it onto a truck.
(1) there are accepted 'temperaments', like ET for pianos. (2) Octaves should not be perfect on the piano, they will sound flat. (3) There is a limit to the accuracy an ear can hear pitch. This gives you some margin to play with
Tempering and temperament are euphemisms for putting out of tune and are the opposite of tuning which means putting in tune.
Amanda Reckonwith Concert & Recording tuner-tech, London, England. "in theory, practice and theory are the same thing. In practice, they're not." - Lawrence P. 'Yogi' Berra.
No, tempering means softening. It is a method of tuning which softens the harsh intervals that result from the combination of pure intervals. Tuning does not necessarily mean setting pure intervals, so a piano can be tuned and tempered at the same time.
(1) there are accepted 'temperaments', like ET for pianos. (2) Octaves should not be perfect on the piano, they will sound flat. (3) There is a limit to the accuracy an ear can hear pitch. This gives you some margin to play with
That depends on your definition of "tuning". And I would flatly disagree with your point 2 (pun intended), not least because the premise of ET is the octave interval being exactly a doubling in frequency.
As to 3, it's true that human pitch perception doesn't have unlimited precision. But the beat of e.g. a non-perfect-fifth is related to the difference between frequencies... which is much easier to discriminate than the base frequencies themselves.
(1) there are accepted 'temperaments', like ET for pianos. (2) Octaves should not be perfect on the piano, they will sound flat. (3) There is a limit to the accuracy an ear can hear pitch. This gives you some margin to play with
That depends on your definition of "tuning". And I would flatly disagree with your point 2 (pun intended), not least because the premise of ET is the octave interval being exactly a doubling in frequency.
A doubling in frequency of what though? The fundamental? You can double the frequency of any partial and compare it to the next octave up. Because the partials aren't exact integer multiples, you can still have "doubling" without just a simple x2 of the fundamental and still have the piano sound in tune. Your mathematical definition of ET is correct, though, for any instrument where the partials happen to also be harmonics. This is not the case in a piano, though, so the definition of ET has to be modified to account for the stretch. In this case, the intervals are such that the division of the octave has all 12 intervals the same size, but the octave itself is not a simple x2. The "equal" part is the division, not the octave size.
Your mathematical definition of ET is correct, though, for any instrument where the partials happen to also be harmonics. This is not the case in a piano
This IS the case in any repeating oscillation (piano strings are no exception), as Fourier demonstrated a couple of centuries ago... or maybe I'm missing your point.
If you define a perfect octave as a pitch which is essentially beatless with the note it is an octave above, and which has a frequency approximately twice of it, that is reasonable for a piano and many other instruments. It is fuzzy, and can be refined, but it is more workable than defining it as a pitch twice the frequency of that note. In order for the latter definition to work, you need a precise definition of the frequency, and that is not workable. It falls afoul of that old truism: "There is no problem so difficult that you cannot look at it in the right way and make it much more difficult."
"There is no problem so difficult that you cannot look at it in the right way and make it much more difficult."
Very true.
I guess a more precise title of the thread (given the starting point in the video) could have been something like: "Why it's impossible to tune a piano perfectly on all intervals at the same time". However I wonder how many people would have read it...
Your mathematical definition of ET is correct, though, for any instrument where the partials happen to also be harmonics. This is not the case in a piano
This IS the case in any repeating oscillation (piano strings are no exception), as Fourier demonstrated a couple of centuries ago... or maybe I'm missing your point.
The point is piano strings are inharmonic (due to their stiffness, their effective length is shorter for higher frequencies), so the partials are NOT in harmonic ratios, but are slightly sharper than the integer multiples of true harmonics. This is a very important point. Part of is due to the strings being struck, rather than driven (i.e. bowed) though.
Your mathematical definition of ET is correct, though, for any instrument where the partials happen to also be harmonics. This is not the case in a piano
This IS the case in any repeating oscillation (piano strings are no exception), as Fourier demonstrated a couple of centuries ago... or maybe I'm missing your point.
You are right about Fourier, but piano strings do not exhibit "repeating oscillation", and the partials are not harmonics. This makes piano tuning complicated in a way that goes beyond the "why it's impossible" article.
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