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Okay, so on Friday the tuner is coming to tune my first ever piano (a 1984 Yamaha U1) for the first time since I got it a few months ago. It’s been tuned every 18 months or so since new and is not at all badly out of tune.

I understand from reading this excellent forum that tuning is not just an exact science, and tuners have some judgement and discretion as to exactly how they tune. I’d appreciate any advice on what to ask the tuner to do. Does it depend on the type of music, beginner / advanced etc. What are the factors that would affect the type of tuning. How do you professionals decide in the absence of instructions from the owner?I’d just like to educate myself on this.

I don’t know whether this tuner tunes aurally or electronically.

Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks.

The technician should measure and record temperature and humidity, and should measure sample pitches across the piano, then should be able to tell you how this will influence the approach to tuning.
In a home tuning I'm less concerned about perfect A=440Hz and try to predict humidity/pitch change to be close to 440 with some room to wander.
The technician should inspect the hammers, action and pedals and report to you about their condition and what can be done to improve the piano.
I believe a technician should understand aural tuning techniques and also make intelligent (not automatic) use of a digital tuning program. If you are interested in alternative tunings, the technician should be open to them and capable of producing them, but should not be dogmatic in claiming to know a magic world's best tuning. Many tunings are beautiful.
The technician should be interested in what music you play, and may adapt the service offered to better meet your musical needs.

To add to Ed's great advice above just this: If you notice something about the way the piano plays or sounds that doesn't seem correct, be sure to tell the technician. Don't worry about getting the specific terms correct, the technician should be able to figure out what you mean. If you don't have any specific items, just enjoy the tuned piano afterwards!

If you don't ask for a specific temperament, then most probably the tuner will normally proceed with equal temperament, since most probably the piano has been tuned that way previously.
But IMO, generally what is more important for the pianists are, how the tuning holds, clean unisons and good sounding octaves. Most of them won't be aware of whether the tuner tuned a proper equal temperament or instead a reverse well temperament.

Greetings,

One of the things that professional techs have that few piano owners possess is an objective view of the piano.When we play a note, it is instantly compared to the result of us listening to thousands of pianos, critically. The normal piano owner( to us, a valued customer, a patron,a mark, whatever), will never have that data-bank-infused vision to use as a template for comparison, but there are some things that, if mindful of, will help the owner communicate more effectively with the guy holding all those weird tools.

One of the first steps is getting a relative sense of your piano's key to key response. This is done in two steps; first you focus your ears, then begin to examine the notes' sounds. To do the focusing, begin at middle C and play the note as softly as possible. While steadily repeating the note, focus your hearing on the tone and begin playing it harder. As you gradually ramp up the force, the tone may change from a more mellow warm sound to a brighter, brassier sound. Or, it may stay the same tone but just get louder. A dead hammer will not change much in the way of tone, and a really bright, hard hammer won't either, remaining glassy from pp to FF. The optimum hammer will be mellow at pp and bright at FF. Some hammers change in a predictable way, which is great for tone control. Some hammers are like a light-switch, suddenly becoming strident at some level of force, which makes the piano hard to control. Listen to that middle C and ask yourself how you would characterize the nature of tonal change as the note is played up and down its dynamic range. Ideally, it should become predictably more brilliant with increased force, and at your maximum amount of strength, the hammers should just reach the level of distortion. (Yes, "distortion" is a valuable color on a concert pianist's palette, giving the crash to the overall sound generally looked for at climatic momements).

Now that you have "voicers ears", compare one note's response to its neighbor. The same? Playing these notes on each key, move chromatically up or down, listening to how each note sounds. When something stands out, document it so that you can tell the tech. It will put him on notice, (sorry for that, tech) that you are listening to things he may be able to do something about. The final goal is to have a piano that you can play without spending mental energy "holding back" because it is too loud. I see that a lot.

The voicing of a piano is usually best done on a well-regulated action, so forget all of that above until you get to the more basic question. You should ask the tech what is the state of regulation. If it is below 75% of standards, playing Chopin, Ravel, Debussy etal. at performance level will be out of reach. It will also be hard to judge how to voice, as the unevenness could be due to mechanical irregularity instead of the felt's inconsistency. While I and others will stick a needle in an occasional hammer that is obviously standing out, bringing the whole keyboard into one even sweep of tonal balance requires the action be regulated and the hammers mated to the strings before any acupuncture is warranted.

The temperament should match the major repertoire. If pre-1880 music is the majority of the playing, I would recommend a circulating, non-restrictive, traditionally based, tuning. F# third shouldn't be more than 18 cents wide, if this is your first exposure. This works for Beethoven as well as Rocky. If your tuner is not familiar with the well-tempered concept, let him tune what he does best and look for another tuner later, if you want something along those lines.
Good luck,

Scirocco,

What is your playing experience, and what type(s) of music do you like to play?

Pwg

There has been some very good advice here already.
Another approach - hire the tech and just see what they want to do (and how well they do it) before assailing them with 20 questions. It's easy to overthink this via the internet.

👍👍👍

Another thing you would consider is that whether your piano is flat more than 5 cents. If so it might need a two pass tuning.

Thanks for the great advice guys, really appreciated.

I certainly don't want to be dogmatic to the tuner or overthink this and will definitely bow to his vastly more experienced ears (I'm only early intermediate piano level). My interest was as much out of curiosity as anything. I kind of understand in general terms how different tunings can prioritise purer thirds and fifths differently but wondered how that would translate to the type of music.

I enjoy baroque and early classical music and that is what will get played on the piano (also my grand-daughter is learning on it but she's only a little kid.)

The piano seems to be in pretty good tune atm. With a basic phone app tuner every key is still showing between 0 and 3 cents sharp. The tuning log shows a pitch raise to A440 carried out in 2016 with one subsequent touch-up tuning. After three solid weeks of hot dry weather lately here in Western Australia I can hear quite a few unisons have gone jangly.

For baroque and early classical music, IMO, you can try Young 1 (1799) well temperament.