Just Tuned My Piano

[Dok]

While I'm glad it worked out for you, I would not recommend that anyone else do this without training or supervision. Piano strings are huge and under a LOT of tension and it's actually pretty dangerous if one of them breaks. I don't know if you've ever had a piano string break on you, but it sounds like a gunshot and could fuck you up pretty good. Aside from all that, a good tuner brings years of experience and will condition and set up your piano to hopefully be stable for years to come. It's also not all that expensive, honestly - this is one thing I'd leave to the professionals - they need the work, too.

[jorri]

Thought about it when i get a new one. I realise how beats work and would probably put it in a non-equal tuning anyway, since i use them on my digital piano mostly.
Prob through a tuner though, can't be too wrong can it? Of course, there's stretched tuning but that's probably easily modelled as digitl pianos have this....I wonder why its not really done with tuners nowadays? (and i'd probably actually put it to 440, unlike previous piano tuners i've hired, which has led to problems halfway through recording before)

The thing that worried me was the time it took....I thought those tuning pegs might be finicky like on similar instruments like a cymbala or cello i've tuned.
How accurate are they? Anything similar i've messed with just jumps a whole quarter tone at a time!it must be different on pianos!

[megamaeng]

Thought about it when i get a new one. I realise how beats work and would probably put it in a non-equal tuning anyway, since i use them on my digital piano mostly.
Prob through a tuner though, can't be too wrong can it? Of course, there's stretched tuning but that's probably easily modelled as digitl pianos have this....I wonder why its not really done with tuners nowadays? (and i'd probably actually put it to 440, unlike previous piano tuners i've hired, which has led to problems halfway through recording before)

The thing that worried me was the time it took....I thought those tuning pegs might be finicky like on similar instruments like a cymbala or cello i've tuned.
How accurate are they? Anything similar i've messed with just jumps a whole quarter tone at a time!it must be different on pianos!

Dunno if this is still relevant but as a former piano tech, I just wanted to say that hammer control and setting the pins is one of the many things that takes years of experience to get good at. So even if you know exactly what pitch you want to tune a note to, actually getting it there and having it stay, and then tuning the other two strings to it will probably be quite a challenge. You won't jump a quarter tone, but moving it slightly and having it stay is not easy, especially after you bang the key afterwards.

But all this said, I say go for it!!! While yes there is the danger of breaking a string, most likely you won't and it prob won't fly into your eye or something. Just double check you're tuning the string you're listening to.

Also, one of the reasons why piano tuners might not put it to 440 is that unless you're really close to 440, you can't put it there in one go. So if you're off by more than a few cents, you'll either need to pitch raise or lower it. If you want to try this at home, just overshoot it in either direction by about a 3rd of the amount that it's off. No need to be precise on this tuning since you're just trying to do a quick pass to have the piano settle close enough to 440. Then you can attempt the fine tuning.

You can't really mess it up so badly that a tech can't fix your tuning attempt. But what I'd do is let a tech tune your piano to pitch and then in the following weeks you can try fixing unisons as they go out. That will let you develop your hammer technique while making your piano sound in tune. I'm definitely simplifying it but if you have your unisons in tune, you're 80% there.

oh and the reason why stretch tuning hasn't been put into a simple tuner like for a guitar is that each piano has a different scale dependent on the harp and string length etc. So each piano, even the same make and model has a custom stretch to have it sound the best through all its octaves.

I hope there aren't any other piano techs here to skewer me Lots of opinions out there haha.

[sessylU]

I would love to be able to tune a piano. One of my big regrets from when I was at studying music at uni was not taking one of the lecturers up on his offer to teach a few people how to maintain and tune pianos casually.

[megamaeng]

yeah it's definitely interesting and good to know that stuff, even on a casual level. Tho I think I had to tune about 1000 or so pianos before I felt like I knew what I was doing haha.