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FAQ about pianos

1) How often should I have my piano tuned?

The two main factors that drive a piano out of tune are weather change and number of hours played between tunings, but the age of the piano has an effect too. Pianos newer than 4-5 years go out of tune much faster than older pianos and may need to be tuned as much as 4 times a year for the first few years. Pianos older than 30 years may not have such great action or tone, but often hold a tuning very well. If you practice more than an hour a day, you'll probably have to have it tuned at least twice a year to keep it sounding good. I've noticed that a piano starts to sound pretty bad after about 60 hours of playing, but in fact I can find notes beginning to go out after only a few minutes! In New York City recording studios, I would be hired to stay around (after the initial tuning) while the artist lays down the piano track, 'touching up' between takes. Now I live in southern California, and the pianos seem to respond to the microclimate of the particular neighborhood that they live in. Often I'll get calls from all my clients in a certain area within one month of each other. I would say that, unless your piano is just furniture, you should have it tuned once a year, minimum. If its practiced on every day, a twice yearly schedule will keep your piano sounding good anytime you sit down to play. If you are a vocalist, string player, or that rare pianist with a very sensitive ear, 3-4 times a year will keep it in 'concert tune'. The 60 hours of playing rule of thumb is a good one to keep in mind when trying to estimate how often to tune your piano. Some practice pianos at the community college near me are played more than 5 hours every day! The newer practice pianos are always favored, but they won't hold a tuning as well as the older ones and, getting over 120 hours of playing in one month, they start sounding horrible very soon after I tune them. A tuners work is never done!

2) My piano hasn't been tuned for about 10 years, is that bad?

A piano that sits untuned gradually goes flatter and flatter. After a long period, you may have to play a C sharp to get a concert C. that piano could be said to be a full semi-tone flat. Often, a piano that is brought out of storage when a child in the family is about to begin piano lessons is quite a long way below pitch. I feel that, especially with younger children, it is very important to bring that piano 'up to pitch', rather than tune it to sound good at the pitch it is at. Young children seem to be very pitch oriented, and are quite aware if their piano plays different pitches than their teacher's piano. Some children will even attempt to transpose their pieces up to make them sound right! Raising the pitch of a piano is usually done in a number of tunings spaced out over time. Many technicians would tune a semi-tone flat piano four times to bring it to concert pitch. I find that the use of a strobe tuner makes it possible to raise the pitch a LONG way and have it come out sounding fairly good with only one session. Of course, that tuning will not last very long and the piano will need to be retuned within a few months. Leaving a piano untuned for many years can also create what are known as 'false beats' in the strings when the piano is finally brought back up to pitch. It works like this: Piano strings don't stretch straight between the tuning pin and the (hitch pin) at the other end, they snake under and over various bars and (things with cool names like) agraffes, pressing tightly against them as the strings tension tries to straighten it out. Piano strings are made of very hard steel which when bent, wants to stay bent, and there are permanent miniature 'kinks' in the steel at each point that the string is forced to make a bend. When the pitch of the piano is raised a long way, the strings are tightened which brings those kinks out on to the 'speaking portion' of the string, or that part which runs between the agraffes (or the capo bar) and the bridge. The kinks prevent the string from vibrating properly and make those funny noises tuners call false beats. Strings that have false beats sound out of tune when they are actually 'in tune'. There is a whole school of thought that has evolved tools and techniques to try and straighten (usually by precise twisting) these kinks, but the best way is to guard against letting the pitch drop that far in the first place!

3) What are the important differences between an upright and a grand piano?

An upright piano is sometimes thought of as an inferior instrument to a grand, but this is not always true. The quality of tone is often a function of string length, this is the main reason why a nine foot grand sounds nicer than a spinet. A large upright has longer strings than a 'baby grand' and will have a nicer tone, especially in the bass where string length is most critical. While 'quality of tone' is a result of the instruments physical properties, control of that tone is the musicians job, and this control is achieved through the action. It is in the action that we find the principal differences between the upright and the grand. In a grand the hammers are horizontal, and gravity resets virtually all the action parts after a note is played. In an upright, the action is standing up, with the hammers swinging on an almost vertical plane, so it needs assistance in the form of springs to reset the action for the next time the key is played. The two springs that can be felt in the upright action are the one pushing the hammer back and the spring pushing the dampers onto the springs. An advanced pianist will often depress a key very slowly in order to get a very soft pianissimo. This technique is extremely difficult on an upright because the springs don't provide as constant a resistance throughout the travel of the action as gravity does. When you try to play a very soft note on an upright, you might get silence instead! Another noticeable difference between uprights and grands is the key length, which can be much shorter on uprights than on grands. Our eyes can see the amount that a short key tips as it is depressed, a long grand key will stay almost horizontal as it goes down. More importantly, our fingers will feel the difference of resistance from the front of a (short) key to the back. A spinet piano has the action placed below and behind the keys, which are extra short to make room for it. This weight difference between key front and back is obvious on spinets. So, can anything be done to compensate for these differences in action feel? On better quality uprights, a parameter known as the 'key letoff' can be tweaked a bit closer, allowing a more controlled quiet touch. Vladamir Horowitz had a similar hotrod setup on his Steinway grand (which always traveled with him to every gig), and I adjusted my Yamaha G5 that way as soon as I learned about it. There are a few potential problems with this hopup, but if the pianist can adjust their technique to accomodate the action, a better result might be had on both uprights and grands.

4) Can I change the weight of my action to make it heavier or lighter?

Yes you can, but I would suggest that you might not actually want it. There are some cases where increasing the 'weight' of the action is a good idea, but they are kind of rare. We often think we need a heavier action when something else is affecting our control of the instrument. The actual weight of a piano action and how it affects playing is complicated and needs some explaining. There are two ways to think about action weight and they are static and inertial. The static weight refers to how much pressure it takes to begin to depress the key, but the inertial weight can vary greatly depending on the speed of depression. A piano could have a light static touch, but very heavy inertial resistance, for example. On most well built pianos, the action is set up to be able to play as soft and as loud as possible, while still allowing the quickest repetition of single notes. Changing action settings or adding lead weights will usually compromise one or more of these tasks. Adding weights to the backs of the keys could increase both types of resistance and create a 'heavier' action, but I feel that too often technicians do this to remedy a problem which should be fixed other ways. One of the most common *other* problems is hammer voicing. When the felt becomes compressed at the head of the hammer from repeated playing, the hammer tone becomes very bright. But, also the hammer becomes loud and soft playing is impossible. A very soft touch still results in a loud note. This makes the action feel too light! If the hammer is softened properly, a soft touch will produce a soft note, and a much harder touch will be required to produce a loud note. The result is that the action will feel MUCH heavier, even though it actually is not. A piano should be properly voiced before any action adjustments made, or weights added.

5) Are there different tunings?

Can a piano be tuned different ways and still be in tune?

There are different opinions about this question. Mine is that a good tuner will tune a given piano very similarly to another good tuner, but not-so-good tuners will tune it differently. Each individual piano IS tuned somewhat differently though, primarily because of a thing called inharmonicity, which I'll explain later. From a hearing point of view, there are three main aspects to tuning Temperament, Octaves and Unisons. Setting the Temperament involves spacing 12 notes equally within an octave. If, for example, the octave between middle C and the next one up were an exact doubling of Hz., or frequency, one could simply use 12 tuning forks and tune each note exactly to the forks. But, oh well, its not that way in real life! Because of a darn little thing called inharmonicity, the actual distance of an octave on a piano is a bit more than an exact doubling of Hz., and to make things more complicated, it is different on each piano. That is why the technician sets the temperament by ear, or if he knows how to properly use one, by strobe machine. Octaves are simply tuned 'beatless', or the fundamental frequency of the upper octave is tuned exactly to the first partial (octave harmonic) of the lower octave. Octave partials are fairly easy to hear until they reach the very high end of the piano, so most technicians do a fair job with these. The notes in the very top octave can be tuned a very small amount sharp because our ears hear beatless octaves as being flat in this range. Sometimes classical pianists will prefer a slightly sharper top octave tuning than jazz or rock players. Unisons are the easiest to hear, and any technician usually sets good unisons, except at the high end where some folks' hearing is not great. Most people think that the technician's great gift lies in his/her hearing, but this is not really true. I believe that many people could develop their ear to hear as well as a tuner. The real skill of tuning lies in the manipulation of the tuning lever and this can take years to develop. A tuner with good lever control can not only bring the string into tune more accurately, but more importantly to the player, he/she can make it STAY in tune longer.

6) I have a very accurate guitar tuner, couldn't I use it to tune my own piano?

Can electronic machines be used to tune pianos?

There is a problem with using an electronic tuner, or even a set of 12 extremely accurate tuning forks and I'll attempt to explain that here. In terms of the sound made, there are four basic properties of a vibrating string: Length, Mass, Tension, and Frequency of vibration. Knowing any three of these properties will allow you to calculate the fourth. Unfortunately, this nice arrangement is complicated by a fifth string quality which exerts a tiny but important influence on the sound, and that is stiffness. An ideal string might be a strong but flexible chain, but hard piano strings are anything but flexible. In fact, the hard steel is so stiff that they break if bent more than once. What stiffness does is limit string excursion (from center) which makes a string return sooner in its vibration cycle. The result is a higher note than would be calculated from the L.M.T.F. The stiffness has little effect on the fundamental frequency of the string, but higher harmonics are produced by progressively shorter sections of the string. These shorter sections are greatly affected by the stiffness and vibrate at a much higher frequency than 'mathematically correct' partials (harmonics) would. Whew! Still with me? I'm gonna wrap it up soon, promise. An octave on the piano is tuned 'beatless' or, the higher string is tuned to the same frequency of the octave partial of the lower string. The theoretical distance of an octave is an exact doubling of frequency, so if A4=440hz then A5 should be 880hz, but because of the stiffness of steel strings the first partial is already a tad higher than mathematically correct. This makes the actual distance of the octave a bit wider than an exact doubling of frequency, and because of the different stringing scales of pianos, each piano is different. The modern system of tuning (Equal Temperment) spaces all twelve chromatic notes equally within the space of the octave. A piano tuner, working by ear, first tunes a beatless octave. Then the tuner spaces the notes at exactly equal distances from each other by comparing intervals and counting beats. A tuner doesn't even need to know that the octave is wider than usual, they just tune it until there's no beats. A guitar tuner, or a set of tuning forks for that matter, are tuned to the equal temperment system, but can't be recalibrated to accomodate various different octave distances found on pianos, that the twelve notes must be spaced equally within. Interestingly enough, and here's a useful piece of information for those of you who made it this far, a harpsichord can be nicely tuned with a guitar tuner (or 12 tuning forks). It would seem that the harpsichord string is so light that the stiffness doesn't effect the first partial. There are electronic machines made for tuning pianos, that can be recalibrated to accomodate degrees of octave stretch. I bought one in the late 70's for tuning Fender Rhodes pianos, which have a flute-like sound with virtually no partials and are very hard to tune by ear. I use it now for pitch raising and tuning high notes one string at a time (instead of two which are much louder) which saves stress on my ears. Plus, it has nices spinning lights which make me feel important and keep me company! I think my ear is more accurate at tuning unisons and setting the temperment, but the machine is probably as good as my ear on octaves.

This FAQ page is under construction, I'll add more stuff soon. If you have any kind of piano related question you think I should include here, PLEASE e-mail me!