Greetings All,

I thought I would share my first tuning experience using the laptop software program Tunelab Pro. I recently bought a nice laptop PC and downloaded the free trial version of Tunelab Pro. I must admit, it did not seem too user friendly to start with but after I read through the manual a couple of times, it started to make sense.

I calibrated Tunelab using a Korg chromatic tuner tone generator which I verified with my A440 tuning fork and our local phone company dial-tone. I thought about calling the NIST number and using the 500 or 600 htz but I felt confident my Chromatic tuner and A440 fork were close enough. I used my tuning fork to tune my piano the first time and the tuning was really pretty close to start with.

I then measured the inharmonicity of the piano and set up the tuning curve template; I used the auto tuning curve feature and selected the default lower and upper partials (6:3 bass octaves and 4:1 treble double octaves).

My piano is a 5' 11" Tokai grand (some say the Tokai’s are poor quality but the one I have seems to be a well built, well scaled instrument IMOHO). I bought the piano back in January and tuned it after I got it home. I tweaked the tuning a little after it settled in to its new environment.

It was not what I would call out of tune before I tuned it using Tunelab but I must say, where it sounded good before, it sounds fantastic now.

I can see how the ETD’s can enhance and improve (as well as speed up the process) the art of tuning pianos. I was impressed with the laptop based program. The only improvement I might make in the future is to add just a little more stretch to the high treble.

I always enjoy reading this forum and feel it is very education in regards to piano technology.

Best regards and happy Easter to all,

Rickster

It's a great program. I'm still finding features in it, years later.

You can adjust the stretch yourself by choosing octaves of a different width. If you want more treble stretch, try 3:1 12ths. Readjust the curve, and notice how the offset for C8 changes.

By all means, take the time to call NIST. Forks can vary by several cents with the temperature, and you never know about a given guitar tuner.

There's a dedicated TuneLab User Group here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TuneLab_Users

--Cy--