Tuning Stability

Dear Tuner's Blog, 

Our School Piano never stays in tune for very long. It was bought brand new about 10 years ago, and has never settled down. Buying a new piano, we expected it would at least hold its tuning, but we have been disappointed and find it hard to understand. Could you please explain what is going on here. Thanks,

…School.  

Tuner's Blog replies…

There are many reasons why a piano will not hold its tune. A piano could be affected by one or by the whole list of these reasons. The number of possible combinations and variations of these problems, while not infinite, is very large, so reducing a reply to a universally applied single reason is impossible.

Tuning stability will depend on:

1. The condition of the piano strings 
2. The piano being kept in a piano-friendly environment
3. The piano being in good mechanical condition.

With a new piano, (10 years old makes this still a very young piano!) one can expect the strings NOT to be a problem.  

Pianos are not generally moved about, they are almost considered a fixture. In a School, the hall often becomes a thoroughfare. A piano will not take kindly to coping with all the temperature fluctuations that even humans would find uncomfortable. This is bound to affect tuning stability.

The mechanical condition of the piano is probably where most tuning stability mischief has its source. Every moving part of the piano action, directly or indirectly, has an impact on tuning stability. Poor alignment of parts, sluggish centres, even dried-out grease where springs are in contact with action parts, all affect how the hammer strikes the string and consequently, on the tone and tuning. 

With a newish piano, there will be nothing wrong with the design of the action, there will be little or nothing that can visibly be pointed at and accused of being the root of the problem. Getting what is a very sophisticated piece of engineering to work flawlessly takes many hours of skilled labour at the piano factory. If this close-up attention to detail is not done - despite whatever quality controls there may be - in the end, the poor customer has to deal with the upshot.

Very few modern pianos with tuning stability issues cannot be vastly improved by going the 'extra mile' in getting the basics right. It is frustrating that manufacturers and retailers can be so focused on pushing pianos through their doors that they seem to care very little about whether or not the piano is really ready to go.

For the end users: private owners, schools etc. a bad taste is left in the mouth! They ought not to be spending more money before they can properly enjoy the piano they bought!•

© Steve Burden

Piano Tuning as a Career

Piano Tuning is unlikely to be top of the list of potential careers for a school leaver. The promise of great wealth just isn't there, a commanding status among your peers is not included in the package either. So what is it that makes people go into this strange and, slightly cranky profession?

Piano Tuning - for those seeking adventure!

Of course, piano tuning is not a job that would suit everyone: fussing over whether a C# is a tiny bit flat or not, will not trouble most of the piano-playing public, but if you relish the thought of getting a standard piano as close to perfectly in tune as is possible while using little more than your ears, then Piano Tuning could be for you.

The great treasures of experience are the reward of years of hard graft learning the basics of the trade. Indeed it is during the early years of a career that the heavy and difficult building blocks of the job as a whole, are put into place. Persevere through these tough times with a growing focus on the prize, and you are the road to success.

Piano Tuning is one of those jobs in which one never stops learning. There are always better ways of doing things. There are greater depths of understanding how the piano action works. By just playing a chord, you can get a pretty clear idea of  how a given piano is going to respond to tuning. 

Just now, it is unclear how the Piano Trade is going to deal with the challenges of the next few decades. Sadly, a poorly-trained workforce will only accelerate an overall decline. Somehow, we in the trade have to look ahead, plan and work hard to save our crucial part of piano culture and our unique set of skills and abilities.

Tuners Journal

© Steve Burden 

    

Tuning a Piano

The job of tuning a piano is one of the most traditional of trades and is done now as it always has been - a few simple tools and a good ear! Some of the earliest pianos are lovingly preserved in museums and private collections. One such piano dated from around 1811 appeared on eBay recently! 

Tuners from the early years of piano history would be fascinated to see an App that does most of the skilled part of their job, so easily available to anyone with a smart phone! (At the dawn of piano history, even the telephone was a piece of

science fiction.)

Back in the 1970s & 80s, before piano tuning aids were widely available, it was not uncommon to meet people who tried, with the help of a book, to tune their own pianos! A few tune-your-own-piano books were written and might still be found in libraries. Hopefully, they are no longer in print! Clearing up the mess after some DIY Piano Tuning sessions were mildly amusing! In one case, the would-be tuner felt the tuning pins were far too tight for him to turn - and so WD40 was used to 'loosen' them up! The sad result was a written off piano! If it were not such a skilled trade, DIY Tuning Books might have become permanent Best-sellers.

Sorry for the quality of the picture - the light was very poor.

This label was stuck to the inside of a piano which dates from the 1920s - when pianos really were tuned 4 times a year. These or similar labels are no longer stuck to the inside of pianos! 

Back in the golden decades for piano tuners, to be busy the whole year round, only 3 months of work would be required to set the ball rolling, as it were. After that, it was just repeat business - easy money! How many pianos have been tuned 4 times a year since the 1920s is impossible to know, but it would be interesting to calculate the amount of money that would have been spent on just tuning a piano 4 times per year.

Some of this imaginary pot of money - no longer spent on piano tuning - has been spent on the digital piano which has established itself as the low-maintenance alternative to the traditional acoustic piano.  

But thankfully, whatever happens in the world of technology and the digital piano, there are still genuine, old-fashioned Piano Tuners, willing to tune your piano (up to 4 times a year). There is still nothing quite like a traditionally-tuned, acoustic piano!

© Steve Burden

Tuner's Journal

Piano Tuners make the News!

It is not often the Piano Tuning profession makes the News. The BBC News Health pages report on a study that is looking into the structural changes within the brains of professional piano tuners. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19398413

Piano tuners who use their ears (as opposed to those who rely on electronic devices) focus their hearing on what most listeners do not even notice. The pinnacle of the tuner's art is the 'setting of the scale' accurately. 

This 'setting of the scale' is the laying down of the central octave so that each note is in a correct relationship with the others. Starting with only a single tuning fork, tuners learn to balance the complex inter-related pattern of intervals in order to fix the 12 semitones that make up the central octave. Once this stage has been reached, tuning the octaves up and down the keyboard is relatively easy.

To set the scale, the tuner listens, not to the dominant pitch given out by the various notes played, but to the harmonics these vibrations generate. Once you get the hang of it, it is not really so difficult, but to the uninitiated, it is like listening to an unintelligible language.

Any two notes played at the same time create a chorus-like sound. Since the texture of the sound is difficult to describe in words, it is fruitless to attempt a definition beyond saying that in setting the scale, harmony is achieved when the intervals (mainly the 3rds, 4ths & 5ths) are nicely balanced.

The study mentioned above, does not address the detail of what goes on in the tuner's brain, it simply records that something occurs in there that is different from what goes on in a non-tuner's brain.

Interesting to note that it was observed that the difference is more pronounced among the more experienced tuners - further proof that this is a job in which one has ever more to learn and gain from experience! 

Tuner's Journal

© Steve Burden

How Often a Piano Needs to be Tuned

Music demands that a piano should be in tune. Regular tuning is the most reliable way to keep a piano in stable tune. However frequently the piano is tuned, the tuning is never static - the weather, temperature and humidity all affect the tuning. This is the same for fine quality pianos and the not so very good ones. In different sections of the piano - the middle, treble and bass - the tuning can move about unevenly. 

Piano tuning is an ongoing battle with the conditions in which a piano is kept. The pianist who has a keen ear and the concert pianist who demands perfection, both expect the piano tuner to have the piano in tune whatever the weather. Achieving this golden goal can be done only by a period of over-tuning the piano. Only when a degree of tuning stability is established, can the time between tunings can be lengthened.

One thing is certain: if while tuning a piano, the pitch has been raised, say, half a semitone, it will take a while for the piano to settle nicely in tune at that higher pitch. So it is quite possible to have a piano tuned, only to find that all too quickly, it loses that recently-tuned sound. This is not the fault of the tuner! 

From the tuner's point of view, a change in pitch is always countered by the stretch of the strings. Altering the pitch of a piano is like pushing something heavy up a slope. Even when the tuner thinks the pitch of the strings are going to stay where he put it, a force - like the downward pull of gravity, fights back as if it would prefer the tuning to go back where it was! 

It is a mistake to think that because the piano was tuned last week, last month, last year or 2 years ago, it will not need tuning again. As a general rule, a piano should be tuned about twice a year and definitely not left longer than a year. If you have a keen ear, you may find the piano needs to be tuned 3 times a year! 

Tuner's Journal

© Steve Burden

State of Pianos in Schools

It is too easy for school administrators who are asked to make budget savings, to focus their attention on the fund of money used for the tuning and maintenance of the pianos. There is obviously, no visible difference to the pianos if they are tuned or not. There will be an audible difference, but if the administrators are tone deaf, an out-of-tune piano is not going to bother them anyway. 

Financial management, for any institution is extremely important, but what makes good sense on a spreadsheet on the finance office computer can be nonsense in the practice rooms. Pianos were once bought by schools as assets, but somehow their value to the budget-makers has fallen to the point where they are now considered a liability. So much for good asset management!

There can be very few people who do not understand the need for institutions to make savings wherever possible. The conflicts of interest that remain after waste has been addressed, will always create problems. 

During separate conversations with a couple of piano teachers recently, the state of pianos in schools was mentioned. At one, high-end, fee-paying school they feel so poor they can no longer afford to have the pianos tuned each term, and so have them tuned once a year. Another school does not usually bother to tune the piano used for the Associated Board Piano Exams. If they do, they seem to look for and accept the cheapest quote they could find!

There could well be a generation of piano-playing students who may never know what a properly tuned piano sounds like. A look at some of the piano recitals and demos that are uploaded to Youtube is enough to demonstrate that there are many who seem oblivious to the howling sound of an out-of-tune piano! 

In term time, many school pianos are played constantly. Tuning stability is impossible if such a piano is tuned only once a year. The tuner can only play a game of catch-up! Because the piano was in such a poor state of tune before tuning, it is not going to stay in good tune for very long after the tuning. This is frustrating for the teacher, the students and the tuner.

Giving children cheap food is no way to plan for a strong future generation. If piano playing is to survive for the next generation, the budget-makers should give the tuning and maintenance of school pianos a much higher priority than has become normal over the last two decades.

© Steve Burden

Tuner or Magician?

Tuners are often asked to work some kind of magic on an unpromising piano for a concert. It is surprising pianists don't complain about the condition of the piano they have to play! Perhaps they do - but after the event it's too late for anything to be done about it.

This kind of thing should not happen: 

A celebrity singer and her accompanist felt the piano they were given to use was not up to scratch. So, at very short notice, the tuner was given 30 minutes to work some kind of miracle with a woefully out-of-tune piano.  

Or, for a New Year's Eve event - a Piano Concerto, complete with orchestra... The piano was to arrive 28 December but could not be unpacked until New Year's Eve itself, and the tuner given one hour to tune it for the concert!

A major American comes to town with his band and entourage but need a local tuner to prepare the piano. The day before the gig, organisers ring for a tuner and reckon the job could be done in 45 minutes.

I remember as a very young tuner being sent to tune an elderly piano for a concert by an established pianist. After my initial tuning I was to tune it again after his rehearsal. Alas, he announced the piano was not good enough to play his program. Fortunately my tuning was acceptable but the piano was found wanting.

Why does this kind of thing happen? Surely, anyone who puts on events like these should have some appreciation of what is involved in preparing a piano for a fully professional concert and ensure the piano is up to the task. 

We live in an age when an instant response is expected for any request. In this respect, the piano does not belong in our modern 'instant-fix' world. Every piano is unique, it does not like rapid changes of environment, and even worse, every piano takes its own time to settle down. A pianist taking their own piano on tour has to accept a less than perfectly tuned piano - unless proper arrangements are made well in advance.

Hiring in a piano is not easy when there is little choice and/or limited funds, but who really wants to pay good money to hear good artists doing battle with an inadequate instrument? 

Tuner's Journal

© Steve Burden

Piano Tuning - A Brief Explanation.

You cannot enjoy playing an out of tune piano. Sometimes pianos can be so badly out of tune, their owners just stop playing them. When children complain the piano does not sound like the one used for their lessons, you know a tuning is long overdue! It is time to contact your local tuner.

There is a defined pitch for every note on the piano keyboard. The frequencies are calculated according to the principles of equal temperament. This piano tuning system uses mathematics to divide an octave into 12 'equal' steps. Once the ratio for a semitone is established, harmonics are used to help the tuner fix the intervals in the scale.

These harmonics are used by the tuner to set the notes in the middle octave. The tuner uses these first 12 notes in the middle octave like a template, thus being able to tune the rest of the piano - hopefully achieving equal temperament across the whole piano keyboard. How close we tuners actually get to perfect equal temperament would interest perfectionists for a very long time.

It takes many years to gain confidence in tuning pianos. A customer once said, "It takes 5 years to learn a job, another 5 to be any good at it, and a further 5 years before you can call yourself an expert!" At the time, it sounded rather harsh, but the truth is that it probably takes even longer than 15 years! Piano tuning is one of those jobs in which you never stop learning. Worse still, a tuner has to keep striving to improve if he is not to slip into complacency.  

The truth is that a tuning may not be perfect - the tuning will be as good as the particular piano will allow. To achieve a perfect tuning, one would need a perfect piano. Even an expensive new piano may not be quite as perfect as one might expect! After 50 or 60 years of wear, whatever perfection there might have been when it was a new piano, has been 'worn' away.  

However, a well-tuned piano will always be a treat to play, a pleasure to listen to and the cause of great job-satisfaction for the piano tuner. The piano tuners who continually seek to excel in the job will everyday, be fine-tuning their skill.

© Steve Burden