I can believe this at some level. Piano tuning is a world of compromises. This is true, although much less-so, even if tuning for a specific performance/key as happens for professional concerts. When tuning for general use the compromises are significant for sophisticated ears (not mine, though - I’m pretty insensitive to the nuance)
But it seems that the results obtained by “ear” of the best piano tuners could be measured, codified and reproduced reliably with professional quality instrumentation. Even my iPhone does a decent job of being a tuner, I can’t imagine that something high-end couldn’t be truly excellent, once calibrated by the work of the genius tuners.
I’ve got an old Chickering upright which is tuned to A 435 or so and a wonderful bass. Comparing an upright’s sound to a grand or baby grand piano is not a fair comparison. Because of the hammer action, an upright is not in the same league as a grand for sound or for ease of playing. An upright hammer has to work around gravity while a grand uses gravity. Different animals entirely.
Otherwise, good video. I can hear the difference between each of the pianos and wish I had the space and the money to afford a concert grand piano.
This is true, but apparently the compromises are slightly different for every piano. So good electronic tuning needs to first measure the individual characteristics of a piano, and then calculate an optimal solution for this piano, and only then the actual frequencies to be tuned to are known.
Such piano tuning apps haven’t existed for long: Entropy-based tuning - Entropy piano tuner
And on their page about “testing the method” they report duing a double-blind test with a group of some professional piano players and a group of some “semi-professionals”, i.e. piano students at a University of Music and serious amateurs. The semi-professionals couldn’t tell the difference, the professionals still preferred the hand-tuned piano.
So, yes, the machines will win this one, too. They are very close to winning, but they haven’t actually won yet.
I’m only “slightly sensitive”. I noticed that certain intervals had some special “magical” quality just after being tuned by my old piano tuner, and I just don’t notice that after the mostly machine-assisted work of the “decent” piano tuner I had the last couple of times.
I’ve owned over a dozen and probably played on over a dozen more, electrics and acoustics.
If it feels right it feels right; more expense can’t improve on that. I’m no maestro, but even if I was, and rich, I’d buy the guitar I loved even if it was the cheap one
I’ll have to run that past our tuner. however, I think he’s afraid to muck with the Chickering’s usual pitch, for fear of stressing one of the old parts too much.
While the pieanso do sound the same, the biggest difference I noted was the sound of the room colored the tone of the first piano a lot more than the second and third, which makes it hard to really judge.
I used to have an old upright, with mildew on the felts, and rust on the strings. I did basic repairs and tuned it myself (I had an ‘A’ tuning fork, and the pegs were pretty stiff so I usually used a small adjustable spanner even though I had the proper tool).
There is nothing magic. You start at the bottom and work upwards. All the strings interact, so tuning one string can cause the others to sound funny. In general deep strings seem to affect the higher ones, rather than the other way around, so you do a quick first pass from bottom to top to get everything in the ballpark, and no obvious ‘wolf’ harmonics. Then you do a second pass to get it closer. And if you are a proper piano tuner (I was not) you are probably close enough.
Tuning double and triple strings is a lark. These are not supposed to be the same pitch. If they are detuned a bit, then you get the clear attack, sustain and decay phases; the decay happening when the strings are no longer locked to a common frequency (Huygens entrainment). If you could tune one perfectly, then you would get no decay, and the thing would hum on. Fortunately, that is pretty rare - you tune the worst of the multiple strings until they are close enough to sound as a single note, and that is usually it.
I got an electric piano because it sounds like my piano might sound for a week or so after being tuned; the bass sounds like an enormous piano I could never afford; and I can play it with headphones on so no-one else has to hear the accelerando in ‘Clair de Lune’ going all to hell. I would still like a ‘real’ piano, but I find it difficult to say exactly why.
I always wondered about this, but imagined that a slight detune would give rise to harmonic richness, rather than have anything to do with decay. Obviously, the strings need to be close-enough that the period of any “beats” (volume variations due the the fundamental harmonics shifting in and out of phase) is long enough such that that they are non-audible. Triads of strings would be less susceptible than pairs, I imagine, too.
I watched a bunch of A440 vs A432 vids just now because of this thread. It’s super annoying. They all play A440 first, so when they then go and play A432, it sounds flat. If they played A432 then A440, then the A440 would sound sharp. Talk about total fuckin’ madness. Just play nice music and stop fucking around is how I feel.
Our neighbors were offering a 1907 Steger & Sons upright for free. It certainly needed a lot of work. We had our piano instructor check it out, and ultimately we passed… He said that it may or may not have been reparable, but if it was, by the time we were done we could’ve (at least) paid for a used Yamaha in good condition (which is eventually what we did).
Franz Mohr was a well-known piano tuner for Steinway here in NYC (Queens.) There were many interesting stories told about his career during the latter part of the 20th century- he tuned for van Cliburn, among others. He was a member of the church I attended when I was young and I heard him speak quite often- he had a charming German accent and really knew how to tell a story!
I had an old Ivers & Pond that was a freebie. It needed an incredible amount of work, which I never did. I ended up paying a dude $100 to get it out of my house, so it ended up not being free.
I wasn’t even familiar with these <440 Hz standards. I have heard of high-pitch saxophones, were A is tuned to 457 Hz, and they’re fairly much incompatible alongside modern instruments (other than, possibly, a trombone or slide whistle). Evidently the saxophone was invented before 440 was the standard, and in the early 20th century there were both high-pitch and low-pitch (i.e. A=440 Hz) horns.
At one point I wound up with a La Monte alto, it couldn’t possibly be old enough to be high-pitch, but that fucker will not play in tune* (I’m no virtuoso, but I know enough to tell something’s off with that horn). I guess it’s just a dog horn which is too bad, because the tone itself is nice.
*By which I mean that, when the mouthpiece is placed where F# (concert A) is tuned to 440 Hz, the rest of the horn plays sharp or flat.
