The Day of the Minipiano

I have been reading 'The Piano Makers' by David Wainwright. It is a fascinating and well-researched book giving plenty of stories of how makers responded to the ups and downs of trade throughout the long history of the piano. 

In 1934, one English maker, Percy Brasted, discovered a miniature piano that was made in Stockholm by Messrs Lundholm. He bought the rights and began making the piano and called it the 'Minipiano' (This was the first registered use of the prefix 'Mini'.)

Piano tuners may never have really liked them but the minipiano restored the fortunes of the piano trade for many years. To give an extra sparkle to the appeal of these pianos, they began  producing the cases in different colours - this was a very daring move in the 1930s!

"... on the day the coloured Minipianos first appeared in the windows of the Barnes music shop in Oxford Street, London, and Wilson Peck in Sheffield, police had to be called in to control the crowds!"

Somehow, the thought of a piano being at the centre of civil disturbance in our lifetime, is highly improbable. Watch this space...

© 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