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Pardon a rookie question, but -

I have a new Levitan hammer with a #2 Watanabe tip. My project piano is a Schimmel grand. I have noticed that the Watanabe tip needs to nearly touch the string coils before it seats on the pin, and even then it is really not quite "solid" on the pin but has just a little "rocking" action.

So - I am wondering if a) I should get a replacement #2 tip; b) I should get a #1 tip; or c) this is normal and I just need to get used to it.

Thanks for any advice.

100% personal preference.

The ideal tip would perhaps be "low and tight". In the real world, the options are . . .
"high and tight"
"low and loose"

"Low and loose" happens to be my choice -- using a #3 tip on everything. I have colleagues that use #1 or #2 tips exclusively and know others that have a whole collection of tips they change out before tuning each piano. They all do good work and there is no apparent trend indicating one approach is better than another. So . ..

Back to what I said at the top. You can try your options and determine what is most comfortable for you and your particular tuning technique. In any event, it's nothing to stress over. Good luck!

German pianos very often have small sized tuning pins, 6.90 or even 6.75 mm. You need a #1 tip for these.

Some seasoned tuners seem to manage with "one size tip for all" (see above). However, especially for starting out tuning, it's nice to have a good fitting tip. In my opinion, "low and fairly tight" is easy to achieve on most pianos if you have a selection of tips. You would best off to get a number of different tips for different pianos and different tuning pins.

Thanks, Jurgen and Keith, for your thoughts. I never realized how individualized tuning hammers, and tips, not to mention tuning techniques themselves, are.

Sounds to me like the piano technician's tuning hammer is like the writer's pen - needs to fit their hand, and their style - and becomes an extension of the technician when they are experienced.

I've observed something that puzzles me. I wanted to ask whether the experienced tuners on this board can confirm this:

On my Ibach (6.9 mm pins), there are some pins that are not perfectly square in their tapered shank. I have a Schaff extension lever with a selection of no. 1, no. 2 and thin-walled no. 2 tip. The lever rocks in the one position, but if I take it off the pin, turn it through 45 or 90°, then it fits quite snugly. On other pins, the fit is more or less constant, no matter at which angle I fit the lever on the pin. On some of the "unsquare" pins, I've actually received better results by placing the lever in an unusual position to achieve finer control.

At first I thought the Schaff (Hale) tips were no good, but then I realized that only some pins gave me this sloppy fit.

This is the only piano I've tuned sofar, so I'm not sure whether the (local) factory used inferior pins, or whether this variation in pin squareness is pretty much par for the course?

My tuning hammer socket fits low and loose. I use this to my advantage as a kind of impact tuning hammer without it being one. I have used this kind of technique for over 30 years.

See this video from PTG where you can watch a few different people tuning unisons. The type and way you use a tuning hammer has to be an individual choice. What works for one person may not for another but in my view, an impact type technique is the most mechanically correct and efficient way to manipulate a tuning pin. That is what George Defebaugh RPT taught at the first PTG Institute I attended in 1979.

I am the last of the tuners you see in this video. You will need a Quicktime player to view it:

http://www.ptg.org/media/tuning.mov

I don't know how this could be if the tip is truly symmetrical and not "lop-sided".

Oh dear, point taken...

It seems my initial intuition was right. The tip is indeed not symmetrical.

I started wondering while watching the tuning unisons video. These are the highest level tuners with professional tools. I presume they put in extra effort to get the unisons as good as possible, since they were filmed. I am pretty sure I can hear some slow beating on some of the unisons. I hope I am not imagining them, do you guys hear them too?

If the top professionals are nudging the pin left and right, until it is good enough and the tuner realizes it probably cannot be made sound purer without spending 10 minutes nudging it, so he lets it be and moves on, doesn't it mean we need a better tuning pin system than the one pianos have today? Maybe there could be a metal plate instead of the soundboard, the strings are attached to pins and there are bolts on the pins, so that each whole turn on the bolt stretches the string by the width of one thread of the bolt (around a millimeter), instead of the whole circumference of the pin that a whole turn on the pin stretches the string now (over 2 centimeters).

Something that uses leverage like a mechanical micrometer, so that the accuracy of the strings pitch would be determined by the accuracy of hearing, not by the luck of happening to nudge the pin in just the right place.

The way I understand it, a micrometer or machine based pin system wouldn't actually cure the problem. The issue isn't really the mechanism of the pin (although it does have its problems), it's the friction that occurs on the bridge between the speaking and non-speaking portion of the string. The various tuning hammer techniques seem to geared around trying to put the pin in a position where it can equalise as much as possible the tension between the two portions. Dialling up precise pin positions is all good and well, but it wouldn't help the problem of why pianos go out of tune and it might even worsen the problem because it removes the speed and jolting which can help to overcome the friction which binds the string to the bridge - it might even result in more string breakages. I think you would have to redesign the bridge on the piano to even use the idea you are describing - but that might come at too great a cost because you have to have a bridge that transfers the vibrations to the soundboard efficiently.

That's my understanding of it anyway - as an amateur physicist, not a piano technician.

There have been a myriad of ideas for bridges and tuning systems over the centuries. One of the most successful was Mason & Hamlin's screw stringer (search the archives). They have a reputation of a high degree of tuning stability. In the end, it was probably a cost issue which ended the production of mechanical tuning systems and today we are left with the 400+ year old system of steel pins in a hardwood block. But guess what? It works.

You are assuming that it is possible to tune all the beats out of the unison. Faults in wire diameter, bridge pin tightness, string length etc, all add up to make for inconsistencies (in harmonics) that can not be tuned out of the finished product. Sometimes you get as close as you can, or sometimes you just tune the loudest harmonics as beat-less as possible. The tuning system can't fix issues like these.

Back to the original post question, I have several tuning tips on hand. I use whichever one fits better and gives the best feel for my technique.

Hi there,

I use a #3 tip for almost everything except for a couple of pianos (one of them being Schimmel), where I use a #2 or, sometimes even a #1.

The #2 tip is what most hammers are shipped with, but a lot of us - especially those aiming for speed - use #3's whenever possible.

Yes, it probably isn't possible to tune all unisons absolutely perfect. There could be defects in the wire, false beating etc.

Nevertheless, I can clearly see this is how even the best of the best tune the unisons, especially in the treble: they know the unison isn't clean and it can be made better, they nudge the pin, doing their best to move the pin as little as possible, they nudge, nudge, nudge, then oops, it went too far. Back off and try again. Others go over and below the right point repeatedly, hoping they happen to hit the spot where they think - I shouldn't touch it anymore, probably couldn't nudge the pin by a smaller amount.

Isn't this kind of a tuning system inherently flawed for something that needs a high degree of accuracy?

If the problem is in the friction at the bridge pins, it should at least be possible to make unisons beatless during tuning. Because if the friction wont let the speaking and non-speaking parts equalize, but over time they do due to playing and the speaking portion goes flat, they shouldn't play a role during the moment of tuning. Also you could pull the strings pitch higher, overcoming the friction at the bridge pins, increasing tension at the non-speaking part and then dropping back to pitch.

Even if some unisons couldn't be made absolutely pure, it should be possible to reliably find the best spot and determine whether they can in fact be made pure. Right now tuners are nudging around, wondering if they can set the tension more accurately or not, rather than having the possibility to set the string tension very accurately and then listening whether it goes better or not. Basically, you could test your hearing for the best spot, rather than your patience at nudging the pin.

Reading the archives, the tuning systems with leverage indeed did have the reputation of being very stable. There wouldn't be a constantly expanding and contracting pinblock where a small changes in the positions of the pins make a big difference in pitch. Some said they were easy to tune, some said they were hard to tune, some said they didn't have enough practice and weren't used to them. Someone mentioned that a whole turn on the pin increased the pitch by one semitone.

I also wonder how expensive it would be to add a wedge with holes to the mould that they make plates with and add a bunch of threaded pins and bolts. All this instead of gluing the pinblock from many layers of wood, drilling over 200 holes in it, fitting and gluing it in to the piano etc.

Yes, you can get them to be beatless, but it's not as simple as that. They are trying to compensate for the fact that the strings and pins will settle back a little bit. If it was just a matter of getting them beatless, that's all they would do. But if you do that, the tuning won't last for even 10 minutes of playing. I've been experimenting with these things on my piano and have tried it various ways. I have found that the most stable tuning happens when you do a steady pull of the hammer, not too slow that friction can grab, I go just slightly past where I hear the perfect unison, then I tap the hammer back a tiny amount to set it and take the torsion off the pin. This tuning method lasts for many weeks or even months. When I just pulled up the pitch and then stopped, the tuning didn't last for even 10 minutes of playing.

I haven't tried the "impact" method yet, but I suspect it would work very well.



That is what tuners often do, the problem is that dropping the string back to pitch is still a guess. You can't actually measure the tension on both portions to equalise them. The usual way to equalise the tensions is to hit the key very strongly to overcome the binding friction. It's all in the "feel" of the tuner. They get an idea of how much friction there is and how far to overpull - or they use the "impact" method of tuning which involves short sharp blows to the hammer to jolt the string to it's correct pitch and overcome the friction. If done properly this tends to equalise the tensions automatically. In the end, the tensions will never be exactly equal, but the friction actually will hold things steady enough to keep tuning stable for a while.

I agree that the tuning system of the piano is not ideal but they obviously settled on this system from attrition - it was the best compromise between functionality and expense. I'm sure there would be many great alternatives, but would they raise the cost of a piano too much. Even on an expensive piano it could be more trouble than it's worth. Plus, tuners have come to learn how to use the existing system very effectively.

I suspect it is more of an engineering feat than you might first think. First, we are talking about strings under enormous tension - that would necessitate bolts and threads of extreme hardness (expensive). The mechanism would be much larger than the pinblock design and would change the design and layout of the piano somewhat (expensive retooling, possibly displeasing aesthetically). So it's quite a challenge. I would love it if they could come up with a simple reliable tuning system though, no doubt about that. I just don't see it happening.

I found this picture in the Piano World archives:



In addition to the geared pins it has a birdcage system, but that is another story.

I should point out again that reading around here and there such tuning systems really did have a reputation of being very stable for a long time.

From the picture they seem rather simple in design and I would think they shouldn't be much more expensive than a pinblock system. Just add a wedge with holes to the plate and the threaded pins shouldn't be that expensive compared to a pinblock. No more hassling with loose pinblocks, drilling hundreds of holes to replace it etc.

This system would also remove the current problem that even top lever tuners are struggling with today, you can't move the pins by such a small amount that you would like to. No more nudging until you run out of patience.

I would really like to tune a piano with a similar tuning pin system, before I start preaching to the world of their superiority. But I wish these systems would spread and get more popular, cause they do seem a lot better.

The problems with screw stringers are the amount of space they take, attaching the strings, and keeping the screws from turning. Those are expensive problems to deal with, particularly since tuning pins are standardized and screw stringing never was.

There have been better systems than the metal tuning pin in the wooden block or the screw stringer.

In the former, it is a rather crude arrangement; a metal pin in a wooden block with tensions applied; although one cannot see it with the naked eye, from season to season the tuning pin angle changes very slightly; the tension tugs the pins towards the hitch pin so to speak when the climate dries out.

In the screw stringer, in addition to what BDB states, there is the problem of broken screw teeth I believe…replacements are a problem.

Here is another type of piano tuning pin set up; these are similar to guitar machine heads. This instrument has been tuned twice in 20 years…never runs out of tune……thousands of these were made in the 1880’s…………

https://picasaweb.google.com/silverwoodpianos/RareBrinsmeadSonsGrandPiano#

Like so many things, it looks entirely simple and easy to the outsider. The devil is in the details.

Don't you think if it worked better, and was no more expensive to produce such a system, that it would have established itself as the industry standard????

More likely a bunch of cranky tuners refused to tune it...