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hi all... i need your help. my prof has asked me to do a lecture-report on piano tuners and the tuning of the piano, how it is technically done. i'm a pianist but i sure as heck can't tune a piano even if my life depended on it, so please i hope somebody can help me. basically, i just need some input, some information on anything and everthing pertaining to piano tuning and piano tuners. i know you guys can help. thanks in advance!

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What subject is this for? You would want a different report for a physics course than for a business or music course.

Go to www.ptg.org

its for my music history class, comparative studies. i don't quite get the stuff about well-tempered clavier, how its tuned differently; how you tune an upright piano... like what are the first few things you should learn about piano tuning and simple stuff like that... not physics. just the music stuff... i don't know. should i include some physics stuff too? thanks!

May I suggest that you do some background research first. There are useful articles in Wikipedia, such as this one , and this one. There is no point for us to rehash this information, and go back and forth through this impractical medium, when there is a lot of information already out there. If you still have any questions afterwards, bring them back here.

oh, ok! thanks, BDB...

SS,

You might want to invest in Art Reblitz's book "Piano Servicing, Tuning and Rebuilding." It's a great resource, with alot of useful information explained in a way that's easily understandable. Your public library may have it.

Also, be sure to read and cite the chapter, Coping with Pianos, from Alfred Brendel's book, On Music. I recommend it to every pianist who expresses even the slightest interest because it says so succinctly what every pianist and technician should consider about each other.

you need to take a look at stuart issicoff's book "temperament" which is a history of tuning and how it has affected music over the centuries. it goes all the way back to pythagoras. quite fascinating!

You might want to take a peek at this:
http://ramstrum.com/momilani/html/TUNING.HTM

Perhaps you will find the tuning tutorial useful:
www.blackstonepiano.com/tutorial/tutorial.htm

The entire tuning can be downloaded as MP3 files, and it doesn't cost anything. There are also links to other webpages that discuss tuning.

Hope this helps,
Colin McCullough

"you need to take a look at stuart issicoff's book "temperament" which is a history of tuning and how it has affected music over the centuries. it goes all the way back to pythagoras. quite fascinating!"
piqué

Except that, sorry to say, it's all wrong. It's a hoax at best.

I think Bill has a point in saying it's all wrong because the book touts a false idea of what constitutes scientific progress and then confuses this with musical progress. As if music from an earlier historical period is somehow lesser than contemporary music. It's just different, dude, and just possibly quite perfect, despite not being "up to date."

But I don't think the book's a hoax, except in the sense that it is a popularization of an idea from another book from the 1950s; thus, the idea of the book itself is rather old hat. And ideas, especially not-very-good ones, go stale pretty quickly.

What might be of real interest to the student of tuning, or piano tuning specifically, is to try to wrestle with the idea of to what degree pianos are, ever, tuned in equal temperament. I like to put the proposition about how pianos are tuned thus: piano tuners usually work to create a beautiful-sounding, artistic impression of equal temperament.

Well-tuned pianos are never tuned precisely to the scientifically-calculated pitches of equal temperament, except in the case, possibly, of A440. Or is it 442? How should one describe the tuning of the highest octaves of a piano when individual notes may be 40 cents or more sharp of their "equal temperament" frequency? It ain't equal temperament.

And in the case of Bill Bremmer, and some others, tuners can create beautiful-sounding tunings which are not designed to imitiate equal temperament.

So much for "progress."

Whatever that means. After all, there are several ways of calculating any physical phenomenon scientifically, and "precise" is such an imprecise word! But no matter what "precise" may mean, Issicoff's book is not it!

My sentence might have been clearer thus: pianos are NOT tuned so that each of the strings is at the theoretically-calculated pitch according to the formula for equal temperament, with A440 as the starting point.

The bottom line is that a piano tuned thusly (and some uninformed people do attempt such tunings) sounds TERRIBLE.

And yet, pianos are tuned to equal temperament in a manner which intervals sound equal, and have been for a long, long time.

It is all error analysis. If you are in a vehicle going 100 miles per hour away from someone standing still, and then you shoot a projectile ahead of you at 100 miles per hour, in theory, that projectile will not be going away from the person standing still at 200 miles per hour. But it will be pretty close, closer than most people can measure, closer than would matter for most applications.

I do not know whether I have heard a piano "tuned so that each of the strings is at the theoretically-calculated pitch according to the formula for equal temperament, with A440 as the starting point" or not, so I cannot say whether it would sound terrible, or mildly out of tune, or perfectly in tune, or otherwise. There is so much nonsense tossed around by physicists who do not understand tuning and tuners who do not understand physics, and the vast majority who do not understand either, it is impossible to say what is so, and what is not.

What I do know is that there are methods of tuning equal temperament by ear, that they work as closely as one can hear. I suspect that is pretty darn close to "tuned so that each of the strings is at the theoretically-calculated pitch according to the formula for equal temperament, with A440 as the starting point." If it varied enough to be noticed, chances are you would notice variations when playing with another instrument which is tuned to equal temperament differently.

From what I've heard, Semipro, many more of them have been tuned and are still being tuned in Reverse Well than ever were in ET. It's no one's fault really, it's all in the way people interpret what they've been taught.

I'm sure all of this has given the original poster a whole new array of ideas to explore.

Semipro,
I have been called in to tune a piano that a guitarist tuned with his little ETD (to save money). Of-course there was no accomodation for inharmonicity. It was pretty ugly...

I have tuned pianos that sounded pretty ugly before I tuned them. One of the more memorable was a fairly new Hamburg Steinway D which someone claimed had been tuned a couple of days before I came. I did not want to tell them anything, and just tuned the piano. (Someone else was paying for it.) All that goes to show is that more people cannot tune pianos than can. It has nothing to do with harmonicity or inharmonicity, just competence or incompetence.

Mike,
You are confusing stretch with equal temperment. The width of the octave, or the frequency above 880 that you tune A5 to, has nothing to do with how the octave is divided up. When you set the inharmonicity on a SAT, that sets the stretch of the piano then it divides the piano up into 88 equal or proportional spaces.