Topic: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

Hi,

I would like to make some research on the topic. So anyone familiar about how the stuff work this days in this area? Can a non-prepared person, say, like me, tune the piano at home by himself using what? Some android software or hardware tuner devices? Please be so kind to share your experience. Thanks.

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

Yes, use the app "Pitch Lab Pro" to help you set the temperament octave.  You have to have at least 1 muting felt strip, (more is better) and some rubber wedges to mute various strings.

Basically it goes like this:  5ths are slightly diminished, and 4ths are slightly augmented.  Octaves are slightly wide.  I always find it's a war between the thirds and the 5ths.  Pure 5th make the 3rds sound harsh.  Sweet 3rds and 10ths knock the 5ths out of tune.  Set your temperament octave first - A 440 down to A 220.  I always like to start checking the 10ths early on so it's kind of a two octave tuning from the begining.  Use the meter as a guide, but your ear is the final judge.  Work outward from the temperament octave.  Keep testing the minor thirds, augmented thirds, 10ths, octive and a fifth, two octaves and third two octaves and a 5th and so on.

Listen to how the overtones of the lower notes are working or sounding against the upper notes and so on.  The meter is a guide, but your ear is the final judge.  Practice makes perfect.  Various people have varying approaches.  You just have to find what brings success to your approach.  One guy I talked to used a Peterson strobe and goes from the lowest note right up to the top.  I always like to test each note as a root, third, and fifth in a chord and see how the bass notes support the upper chord.  Upper notes should be nice bell tones that sing out.  One thing I love about Pianoteq is the tuning.  It's hard to get an acoustic to sound as nicely in tune as Pianoteq.

Last edited by GRB (09-02-2017 03:24)
Pianoteq Pro 7.x - Kubuntu Linux 19.10 - Plasma Desktop - Hamburg Steinway

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

Hello Andrei,

As a person who was born with perfect pitch, I taught myself how to tune a piano.  It took me about five years (not every day for five years, of course) to learn how to manipulate the tuning hammer (wrench) with a fine-enough touch so as to tune a piano to my own satisfaction.

Rest assured, if you undertake tuning a piano, you WILL break a few strings now and then!  Most commonly, a piano tuner breaks a string because he has inadvertently selected the wrong tuning pin, and then proceeds to over tighten the (wrong) string by accident, and .... pop!!!, a string is broken from over tightening it.  One must learn to be very careful to select the correct tuning pin for a given piano string.

If you decide to acquire a tuning hammer (wrench), you should be aware there are numerous "cheap ones" out there that are not good for tuning a piano with any deal of accuracy.  Why not?  That's because cheap tuning hammers happen to "flex" when you attempt to tune a piano string.  Expect to pay approximately $150 USD for a good new tuning hammer.  (You can find cheap tuning hammers for about 1/5th that price, but you will eventually end up purchasing a good-quality tuning hammer.  Spare yourself the time and trouble -- and acquire a good-quality one right from the start.)

If you aren't shown how to manipulate the tuning hammer (wrench) correctly -- and I see a LOT of poor tuning hammer technique in YouTube videos -- you will end up "bending" the tuning pin ... instead of twisting it correctly. 

* * * * * * *

Regarding electronic tuning devices, some tuners might be okay for tuning guitars, but they are not sensitive enough to tune pianos with the accuracy required to do so!  Many cheap hardware devices (such as a Korg or similar tuner that retails for $20USD) are accurate to only about +/- 1 cent (one hundredth of a semitone); the best PIANO tuning devices are accurate to within +/- 0.1 cents (one-thousandth of a semitone). 

Even if you are able to tune a piano using a hardware or software electronic tuning meter, the individual pianos' irregularities require that you may need to deviate from absolute equal temperament perfection -- because the pianos are imperfect devices in themselves.  You have to learn to "listen" to what the piano is telling you; otherwise you may (at best) wind up with a piano that a tuning device claims is in tune -- but which still does not "sound" in tune!

Enough of my rambling,

Cheers,

Joe

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

Hi, thank you very much for replies! Meanwhile I continued looking around on my own. There seems to be a software (for all major platforms) called TuneLab Pro. It's not free. But seems it detects great and it take in account the inharmonicity imperfections, etc. I need to read the manual carefully. Thank you very much for the tips about the pins and a good lever. It seems to be the hardest part.

Last edited by AKM (09-02-2017 10:21)

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

I don't think you need to spend much for tuner software.  What I recommended is very good.  Remember it is your ear that is the final judge.  Almost any electronic tuner will help guide you as to whether the note you are working on is sharp or flat, but it has to respond quickly enough.  I've tried cheap LED ones that wont work because the response is just too slow.  You have two things, the attack, and the decay.

I wanted to mention that if the entire piano is more than 10 cents flat do not try to raise it to A 440 in one go.  The tuning will sag as you do it, and the end result is poor.  Bring it up 10 cents at a time.  This in one important reason for tuning a piano regularly.

Also tuning is really based on the equality of diminished chords and augmented chords of which there are only three each. So playing them up and down in each and every inversion is a good test, plus just checking the 3rds of both chords up and down more or less the entire keyboard.  In fact play all combinations of interval up and down chromatically to check if anything seems slightly out. Keep in mind that one and two octaves and a 5th must always sound good.  I always check bass notes against upper triads, listening carefully to the best match of the overtones of the bass note.  I also use a little musical morsel of John Novello's as a test.  Wide intervals are important to check as they can end up being nasty.  That in fact is why I don't like the stock Casio PX-150 voice.  The tuning is bad.

As for an expensive tuning hammer, I can't say.  I never owned one, but there can be issues of one with a short head not clearing the frame.  An assortment of wedges is helpful.

Last edited by GRB (09-02-2017 19:37)
Pianoteq Pro 7.x - Kubuntu Linux 19.10 - Plasma Desktop - Hamburg Steinway

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

GRB wrote:

I don't think you need to spend much for tuner software.

The demo limitations of the TuneLab are perfectly fine for my needs. I respect how they realized it very much.

If anyone interested in some other comments to the same question here is another similar thread of mine on another forum.

GRB wrote:

That in fact is why I don't like the stock Casio PX-150 voice.

I don't share same concerns. Everything that can't be called "awfully out of tune" is perfectly fine for me.

Last edited by AKM (09-02-2017 20:47)

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

AKM, Tuner Entropy fine. It is multi-platform. Perhaps the best result among electronic. It not only takes into account the disharmony of the strings, but "listens" to the actual height of the overtones and takes this into account when calculating the adjustment.

Last edited by scherbakov.al (09-02-2017 23:32)

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

AKM wrote:
GRB wrote:

That in fact is why I don't like the stock Casio PX-150 voice.

I don't share same concerns. Everything that can't be called "awfully out of tune" is perfectly fine for me.

Once you start tuning your own piano, you will probably become more sensitive to the issues as opposed to just accepting things as the way they are.  You will begin to notice specific intervals that are out of tune. On wind and string instruments you can subtly adjust the pitch on the fly.  With a fixed pitch piano you have to just accept it for the most part.  Of course once you start tuning yourself you will become more critical and pull out your hammer and wedges and make adjustments up until the point you can't really improve it much.  That said, you have to figure out which is actually the offending note.  Is it the upper voice, the bass, or an inner voice that is slightly off?  That's where all the tests come into play.  Getting the temperament right in the first place is of utmost importance.

Pianoteq Pro 7.x - Kubuntu Linux 19.10 - Plasma Desktop - Hamburg Steinway

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

I saw you ordered a lever.  I hope you ordered a temperament felt or two, and an assortment rubber wedges.  You are going to be dead in the water without them.  You have to be able to mute off strings to be able to tune properly.  There's been a lot of mention of good unison tuning.  Keep in mind all the upper notes are actually 3 strings sounding in unison and the upper bass notes are 2 strings each.  A note can become offensive because just one of the two or three strings is off; but now you have to figure out which of the 3 or 2 is bad.

Last edited by GRB (11-02-2017 04:10)
Pianoteq Pro 7.x - Kubuntu Linux 19.10 - Plasma Desktop - Hamburg Steinway

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

GRB wrote:

I saw you ordered a lever.  I hope you ordered a temperament felt or two, and an assortment rubber wedges.  You are going to be dead in the water without them.  You have to be able to mute off strings to be able to tune properly.  There's been a lot of mention of good unison tuning.  Keep in mind all the upper notes are actually 3 strings sounding in unison and the upper bass notes are 2 strings each.  A note can become offensive because just one of the two or three strings is off; but now you have to figure out which of the 3 or 2 is bad.


Here's a quick way to tell which one of three unison strings is out of tune (as a touch-up between full tunings):

Mute the leftmost string from the left, and play the note.  Listen if the center- and rightmost strings are in tune with each other.  If they ARE in tune with each other with the leftmost string muted, then you know that the leftmost string was the out-of-tune culprit.

If the sound is still out of tune, this time mute the rightmost string from the right and play the note.  Listen if the center- and leftmost strings are in tune with each other.  If they ARE in tune with each other with the rightmost string muted, then you know that the rightmost string was the out-of-tune culprit.

If neither of these tries results in the remaining strings sounding in tune, then you know that the culprit was the center string!

* * * * * * * *

All of the above was based on the assumption that only one of the three unison strings was out of tune.  If more than one string is out of tune, then nothing seems to work with my little scheme -- then it's safe to assume that additional keys' strings also have more than one unison string out of tune -- and you will probably have to tune the whole piano.

Hope you were able to follow my logic.

Cheers,

Joe

Last edited by jcfelice88keys (12-02-2017 18:02)

Re: Real pianos - electronic tuning technologies - home made tuning

Thank you guys