(TL;DR version: I’d like to borrow or rent a decent piano tuning hammer but don’t know how to go about it.)
A friend of mine has an old upright piano (actually a player piano that was converted to standard piano) that is in need of a lot of work and also very out of tune. She always asks me to play for her but, even though I’m really pretty bad at playing, it is unpleasant and difficult for me to play something that is in such bad shape.
I’ve never tuned a piano before and have no training tuning pianos but I told her I could try to tune it and that would make me more happy to play it. I have no illusions of being able to tune it in a way that would please even an intermediate eight-year-old student, but it doesn’t need to be tuned very well and if I don’t do it, it’s not going to happen.
I would need to procure the bare basic tools needed for tuning. My understanding is I would need an electric tuner of some sort along with a microphone (not going to use tuning forks), a tuning hammer (aka lever or wrench), some rubber wedges to mute individual strings, and perhaps a felt temperament strip to mute several different strings at once.
The mic, tuner, and mutes are not an issue. The problem is the tuning hammer. Apparently using a “budget” hammer leads to lots of grief because if it’s a poor hammer you can’t get the proper feel to make subtle turns of the pins that tighten or loosen the strings.
If I thought I’d be doing a lot of this I would shell out for a decent tool, but this is probably a one-off. Does anyone have any idea if/where I could borrow or rent one? Yes, I could call a piano tuner and ask but it doesn’t seem the kind of thing you’d ask one unless you knew him/her.
If all you want is a rough tune (each key closer to the note it’s supposed to be than to any other note), I imagine that even a mediocre hammer will work fine, though you may learn to hate your hand after the first 20 or so strings.
I have no experience tuning pianos, but I have tuned an autoharp, and even on those things (“only” 36 strings, and less tension per string too) each round of tuning was tiring and tedious (and it took several rounds to really bring it in to tune; as you went around the instrument, tuning it up, you were simultaneously detuning every other string by compressing the soundboard infinitesimally further, not to mention plain old settling). It’s possible that it’s easier with an impact hammer; supposedly you don’t directly torque those, instead using a weight and gravity to do the tweaking. Pretty neat.
Never tune keys in sequence. The uneven tension (and force) could warp or even destroy the soundboard.
Not sure how helpful this is, but I figured I’d try.
For a one-off, you are probably going to end up spending close to $100 for a decent tuner and a hammer and the other bits you’ll need. A professional tuner will probably cost you about $100 to $150. I’m guessing this piano will probably be on the high end of that considering how rough it is.
It’s going to take a professional probably an hour or two to do the job. Since you don’t have experience at it, you can expect it to be an all day job, easily. It’s going to be a very long, tiring, and frustrating experience.
Personally, I think the cost difference is small enough that I’d just fork over the cash and pay someone who knows what they are doing to do it. The results will also be a lot better. Tuning instruments isn’t just a matter of setting the strings to the pitch that the meter tells you to do. If you don’t understand temperament and how to set it then you’ll never get it to sound right.
Get a professional piano tuner. He or she can get you the tune you need. They aren’t that expensive, compared to the damage you can do, trying to do it yourself. And, IME. they can advise as to what needs repair or replacing.
My upright 100+ year old piano plays just fine. It has been looked after by a professional piano tech through its life. It plays beautifully, and I enjoy playing it.
Thank you for the input! I understand stretched tuning and the need to tune by intervals. I don’t plan to tune each note to an exact pitch via a tuner. I plan to tune a middle octave first with the tuner then proceed to outer octaves tuning them by ear by matching them to the same note in the octave I tuned by electronic tuner.
I choose not to opt for a professional because the object here is not so much to get the piano tuned well but for me to play around and see what it’s like tuning a piano. I expect it to be long, arduous and frustrating. Luckily I can always just say fuck it if it’s too much stress.
Thank you for your post. Yeah, I initially figured a cheap hammer would be fine, too. But after reading up on it, it sounds like the frustration factor of not having the touch needed to get the pin turning just right might not be worth it. But it is all just a lark so that may be the way I will eventually go. I’d rather not though.
I realize I might well screw the whole thing up. That’s why this opportunity is so nice because it really doesn’t matter if I do. I’m really very lucky here.
But the piano also needs regulation and adjustment. Just tuning it won’t make it playable. I hope to do that as well but that introduces a whole new set of tools that I will need.
And yes. I know there are professional tuners for a reason. In no way do I expect that I can do anything even close to what a pro piano tuner could do. This is really more about the opportunity to tinker around with a piano. I love pianos and I’m fascinated by the chance to roll up my sleeves and tinker with the innards.
Unless tuning hammers are something very special (and they shouldn’t be, as they are nothing more than a glorified socket wrench), most tools work just fine in the cheaper “Harbor Freight” versions. The difference shows in longevity and nuance that the beginner probably can’t appreciate.
I have had the same desire from time to time, intrigued by the idea of tuning a piano–fully knowing that it is a skill that requires learning from a master.
You have one advantage that I didn’t have when I daydreamed about breaking pianos a few decades ago: YouTube Videos.
In the past, it would have seemed silly for someone to try learning a tradesman craft without serving under a master
My own youthful days as a machinist bear witness to this, as I can’t imagine someone learning the nuances of operating a Bridgeport mill without having a master to teach them. But nowadays there are thousands of videos of old shop teachers and tool and die men teaching how to do just that, and that’s an amazing thing.
Hello, everyone. This my first post. I’ve been a piano tuner since 1986 and it’s something I enjoy very much. I study the craft all the time, and work hard to improve my skills. You can learn to tune your own piano, but it takes a lot longer and requires much more effort than most other skills to learn. You can find inexpensive piano tuning tools on eBay and I’d start there. If you have an old clunker family piano and you are mechanically inclined, and very patient, you will probably not have a problem as long as you realize that you are not going to get perfect results right away. It is not like tuning a guitar! You are dividing the octave into 12 equal parts and the slightest mistake will give you some horrible sounding chords. First, go to your public library and take out a book called Piano Tuning, Servicing, and Restoration (or something like that) by Arthur Reblitz. It’s the standard text, and the one I learned on. Make a pot of coffee and read the book from cover to cover three times. If then, you are still motivated to tune your piano, get some tools on eBay. You will need a tuning hammer, several rubber mutes, a temperament strip (a long strip of red felt) and a pitch source, which could be a tuning fork or some electronic tuner. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can use a cheap electronic tuner for tuning that piano! It is not accurate enough, and although you might get close, the chords will sound horrible. Please contact me if you have further questions; I enjoy helping people get started in making their piano sound better. Good luck!
Well, it’s an older thread, so maybe I Love Me, Vol. I will let us know if they actually tried, and will let us know the results. As a guitarist, I have a question about the statement that you can’t just tune the strings to the tuner. Won’t that give you a normal, even temperament? I understand each of the three strings in a course are tuned slightly differently so you get rich overtones, but aren’t they centered around the point I’d expect them to be?
Either way, welcome to the Dope, GregThePianoTuner!
Due to inharmonicity the overtones of a piano string are not exact harmonics of the fundamental. If you tune so that the fundamental of each string is “mathematically” in tune the overtones will be out of tune. Tuning a piano is a compromise of getting the fundamentals tuned to the desired temperament while keeping the overtones from producing unpleasant harshness when notes are played together. This inharmonicity varies between different makes and models of piano and to a lesser extent between different pianos of the same make and model. There are electronic tuners that can store the tuning for a particular piano, but that tuning needs to be worked out by ear first. Plus it will always need to be touched up based on aging of the piano and variations in environmental conditions.
American pianos traditionally had n iron/steel frame. Because of American central heating. If that’s what you;ve got, you aren’t likely to warp it by tuning it up or down a tone, which is unlikely to be required anyway.
Evening grossly adjusting my piano didn’t have any effect on the attack and delay of the adjacent keys (which is where you would notice it first), except that the strings are shared (that would be different on a different piano). When you have a string that makes up two lengths, tightening one length can affect the other length…
IANA piano tuner, but it sounds to me like tuning is the least of her worries. If it’s all badly out of tune, that means the shape of the structure has changed: the bridges, capo bar, soundboard or something.
As a player piano, it would have got a lot of wear. The good news is that, as a player piano, it was probably built very tough to start with, and if your complaint is just that it sounds bad, that would be because the action has deteriorated, and you’d start by replacing all the felt and leather.
If it’s the bottom strings hat sound bad, that perhaps can’t be fixed by tuning. Those wire wound strings sometimes fail with corrosion or over use.
edit: I wouldn’t worry to much about the piano hammer. Using a wrench out of your toolbox is sub-optimal because of reach or looseness, and using a finger-wrench is suboptimal because your fingers get tired, but both work: anything with a fixed handle, sufficient reach, and enough leverage to get your hand on will be perfectly good.
Thank you for taking the time to join and contribute.
It’s people like you who bring solid experience to bear that make this place what it is!
It is my understanding that for the actual fine tuning the technician is not actually turning the pins, but bending them slightly with the hammer–an action that might be challenging with whatever came out of the toolbox.
On the other hand, it would seem that my favorite Brazilian saying applies here: Quem não tem cão caça com gato…“He who doesn’t have a dog hunts with a cat”
(I love that saying, because it evokes images of burly hunters out there in the bush with their house cats meowing in the lead)
Indeed, I have some experience in insulting pianos–a friend and I mended a broken string in the lower registers of an aging piano at church by tying a crude square knot in it with pliers. It looked horrible and sounded pretty bad, but it was an improvement on the previous non-note.