piano tuning

groovyisland

groovyisland

hay wasa
i dont have a piano but virtually every time i try to jam with a piano it's way off from concert pitch or a440

i remember reading once that piano tuners tend to tune pianos considerably lower so the soundboards will last longer

even if someone says their piano has "just been tuned" i have to either tune my instrument to the piano or, if that cant be done, forget about jamming


whats the usual piano tuning strategy for pianos?
 
Well the soundboard thing is crap ..... just an excuse to be placed among the many other loads of crap that I hear tuning customers tell me that some tuner told them.

Most of the time when a piano tuner tunes a piano low, it's because he's either lazy and wants to make some money and leave, or because he doesn't want to spend the sometimes considerable time it takes to make a customer understand why it's gonna take multiple tunings and possibly broken strings to get it up to pitch.
I always tune pianos to standard pitch period, unless the situation is such that there's no reason for the customer to spend the money.
Part of my job is to do the customer right, so if it's a little old lady that only plays hymns to herself once a week, why should she pay for pulling it up to pitch? For her it'd be a waste of money.
But I ALWAYS take the time to explain the whole thing to any customer that has a piano that's low, and if it's not very low ... I ALWAYS pull it up without even discussing it.
Thing is ...... if a piano's low enough, (say 1/4 step or more) then it will not hold that tuning very well and that can be difficult to make a non playing parent of a piano student understand ...... and if they don't understand and the piano goes out of tune very fast, and it will, then they think (and tell others) that you're a bad tuner.
For many tuners it's just easier to tune it where it is and get out.
But after 30 years of tuning I've gotten my schpiel fine tuned to where I can make any little old lady understand. But it usually ends up being a half hour to an hour of conversation and very many tuners don't care to do that.

Oh, and also there are a lot of crappy tuners out there.
 
Just tune to the piano . . . guitarists are way too addicted to their tuners. I used to tune to a dial tone if there was no piano available.

Anything MIDI can be retuned fairly easily. But I never played in a MIDI & acoustic piano group, so . . .
 
dementedchord said:
well we agree on this one bob... one point though isn't it partly a matter of bad pin blocks and a need to repin the damn thing????
Click to expand...
Well it can be but that's usually the least likely scenario unless it's a pretty old piano. Out of about 900 pianos a year I would run into pianos that needed restringing maybe once or twice a year. Usually it's just a matter of the piano not being tuned regularly.
If you don't tune a piano at least once a year, it WILL go down in pitch as the plate expands and contracts which tightens and loosens the strings. Since it's about 40,000 lbs of tension, just like a clothesline will be loose tomorrow when you tighten it today, the piano wants to go to lower tension which equals lower pitch.
It varies by piano but if you don't tune a new piano for 10 years or so it's likely to be down 1/4 to 1/2 step just because of that. And it's extremely common for people to let their pianos go that long and longer between tunings.
 
thanks for the explanation lt bob

it does seem like theyre usually in-between tones like 1/4 step

yes we guitarists love our tuners

i used to think that most recordings were considerably off from concert pitch... then i discovered to joys of intonation. now that i can intonate my guitars with my peterson v-strobe and earvana nuts it seems like most recordings are in tune
 
My mom has an antique grand that she has had tuned annually(she's an instructor). One day I was there when her tuner was and I asked him if he was tuning to 440. He simply told me he didn't know. He subsequently pulled out his tuner and the piano was STILL at 440 after who knows so long.

Either way. He has made sure since then to tune it to 440.
 
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