I have a piano that is out of tune, and I know tuning pianos properly is complicated enough to have its own profession. But I think it would be interesting to have a go myself, for fun.
But is this even meaningful? Could I spend a day with some instructions and get a half-decent job done? Or would I just damage the piano or make it worse?
Good instructions (books or online) for learning how to tune a piano would also be appreciated.
I would encourage anyone who is interested to tune their own piano. My personal experience is... (I am an amateur in the true sense (Latin: "To Love"), have played piano for 8 years and probably tuned my own piano for 5 years (when I have time))
It probably took me about a week (off and on, I suppose about 6 hours) to completely retune my old piano from the ground up after having watched several hours of (slow, boring) instructional video. My tools were
I actually never learned the cost to have a piano tuned, but I hear it is expensive, so I would say it is worth it. It is not that hard, although it takes a long time at first.
Here are some tips. (personal experience, upright piano)
When tuning by ear, (this is hard to describe), when two notes are close, but not just right, there is like a small wild ring. Also, normally the tones of two notes seem to fluctuate like long waves with sub waves. The long waves are the easiest to measure I think. The long waves of the two notes should match up.
Let me know if you have any questions. This is all personal experience.
As you already suggested, it takes time. I would say that to begin to be a good piano tuner takes at least 3 years and you still have plenty of room to improve.
It helps to have a good and discerning ear, but you do not need what people imprecisely call perfect pitch. You will need a good reference tuning fork or pro electronic tuning reference. I prefer using a C tuning fork but most people use a A.
One of the most difficult part for amateurs is that they usually have only one piano to tune, their own and that
they usually have been very influenced by this piano and its probable incorrect tuning evolving in time.
they do not know what they want in term of temperament
they are not aware of the numerous pitfalls of our human sense of sound.
they believe that all pianos are more or less the same as regard tuning
A thing you must do and that you must do often is to go in as many places as you can (piano sellers, friends, etc.) and hear different pianos to help develop a feeling of the very diverse compromise that a tuning is.
You need some basic tools :
a tuning wrench matching the model of your piano. Most upright pianos have the same kind. Choose one with a solid and long handle, it is more comfortable.
tools to mute or isolate strings (when tuning notes having 2 or 3 strings, also initially to have a whole central octave with only 1 active string by semitone)
and a lot of patience. The best would be to have two different pianos in the same room. One more correctly in tune than the other. Practice on one trying to match the tuning quality of the other.
EDIT: Further basic advices as several suggested I extend my answer.
There is a lot of easy things you can do as a beginner. Do not rush.
On a piano which is not too out of tune, concentrate on a few notes in the medium part of the piano (extreme low and the upper register can be tricky at first) that are the most out of tune or the most disagreeable sound. This is usually because the two or three strings of this note have been drifting from each other. First mute the (two) lateral strings on the target note and do the same to a note one octave apart. First tune the central string using the octaved note as a reference. Then unmute one of the lateral ones and match it with the central string, listening for beats, try to always finish your tuning by a smooth move pulling the string while playing (it is usually more stable). re-mute then match the other lateral one with the central one. Unmute all and check first as an isolated note and with the octave.
Most amateur pianos are not tuned sufficiently frequently, especially in their early years, that's a pity because it degrades their further tunability. If yours has drifted a lot from the reference tuning you want (usually A=442Hz or A=440Hz), do not try to re-tune it at once or in one move. First learn to improve its harmonization : improve individual notes, try to determine how the drift is spread other the piano (it is quite common that the medium has drifted more than the bass or the treble parts because of a more frequent usage). Look closely at the strings and tuning systems: are all strings and systems in good shape (no rust, regular winding, no excessive pinching, even outside length of tuning axes, etc.) ?
Good tuning is associated with good key subsystems : learn more about the mechanics, look at the hammers (are they moving silently, are they aligned with the strings angle, are they moving back in place quickly ?), at the felt (is it even from a key to another ? is it too marked by the strings ?).
EDIT
As promised. One good (but not as complete as it claims) reference in English, now in paperback is :
Piano Servicing, Tuning, and Rebuilding: For the Professional, the Student, and the Hobbyist. Arthur Reblitz, 1997, 1-8795-1103-7
Beware, the same author made several books on piano construction, mechanical piano, history of piano-making.
There are tuning exercises and beat charts for a common tuning system.
Well, this is kind of late, but, no, you can not learn to tune a piano in a day.
Why do I say this? Well, I am a Registered Piano Tuner with the Piano Technicians Guild and I've been teaching piano tuning for eight years.
You can however learn a lot in a 20 hour basic crash course. But how well your tuning will sound after depends on your ear and aptitude.
My student's success rates, after 20 hours of instruction and supervised practice, are roughly:
Have a very poor understanding: 30%
Can finish the tuning but the piano sounds horrible: 30%.
The final tuning is not great, but playable. Sounds like a piano that hasn't been tuned in a year: 30%
These students have an exceptional understanding of the concepts presented, and their final tunings are impressive: 10%
Potential of Students:
Percentage of students who can achieve professional results with practice: 25%
Percentage of students who could probably learn to tune their piano to their own standards: 50% (includes the previous 25%)
These statistics are subjective, from my experience teaching over 200 people to tune their own pianos.
You can break strings and round off the edges of the tuning pins with poor technique and poor tools.
You can drop the tuning hammer and chip the keys.
There is other damage that could be done just by being careless.
The Reblitz book is not great for tuning, IMHO.
Hope that answers your question.
If you have good fine motor skills, can read and understand the section on tuning in the Reblitz book referred to by @ogerard, and learn to use a professional grade Electronic Tuning Device (ETD), I think your goal is entirely achievable.
But probably not in one day, maybe closer to a week, that's how long it took me to get to the first tuning I thought was "listenable," starting from scratch with an old upright I bought to learn on. I used the Tunelab software (in free trial mode).
Yes, you will make your piano's tuning worse, to start with, until you get good enough at it to satisfy yourself (or decide to call in a professional). Yes, you can cause serious damage to the pinblock of your piano if you are not careful, so I wouldn't recommend learning on your main piano, because the pinblock is a major component and can be expensive to repair.
Getting "good" at it takes some serious investment in time, energy, and practice. But for some people, it's worth it. After that first acceptable tuning, it took me a few months before I felt up to tuning my main piano, a small Chickering grand. A year after that, I passed the Piano Technicians Guild tuning exam, and now tune professionally. And my piano is always in better tune that it used to be before I headed down this path.
For decades, there has existed a raging debate in the piano technician community about aural vs. electronic tuning. I have learned and used both methods. My feeling is that it is easier and faster to learn to do an acceptable tuning electronically, than it is aurally. But that alone will not give you the understanding required to be able to tune professionally.
I had 2 pianos that needed tuning. I bought a tuner for my ipad and a cheap tuning wrench and read a lot of details on the internet. The YouTube videos showed me what a decent piano tuner does to learn the craft. It's an ear training exercise and can take hours to get a piano sounding optimal.
BUT, I didn't want to spend the money so I used the tuner and tuned from middle C up and octave using the tuner (a guitar tuner would work for this step). Then I tuned all the C's, C#'s, D's etc until the whole keyboard was intune with that original octave.
One of the pianos was a 100 year old upright and I was afraid to break strings so I just made it sound good with itself and did NOT try to pull it up to A=440. So, it made a terrible upright useable for my daughter to have a piano when she moved out.
I think the pianos we vastly improved by the effort since I can hear a piano that's out of tune. When I was done I didn't hear any notes that sounded like clinkers any more. I'm sure it would have not met the standards of a professional tuner but you get what you pay for in life and cheap is often good enough if you don't have a lot of savings like most of us.
I've been tuning pianos since I was 25. Since age 42 professionally. I'm almost 62 now and still getting better. You might think I'm just a slow learner...maybe so but piano tuning is something most will always be able to improve their skill no matter how long they tune. If you're serious in perfecting your skills, contact your local PTG chapter...most welcome visitors to their meetings...that's what I did 20 years ago and it is what jump started my professional piano technician career.
A few answers to OP's questions:
Could I spend a day with some instructions and get a half-decent job done?
Yes. Lots of people "touch up" sour notes on their pianos between regular tunings.
Or would I just damage the piano or make it worse?
That's a possibility. The main danger is that you break a string, but you can mostly avoid that if you are careful. If the piano is really out of tune, chances are you'll make the tuning better, not worse.
Good instructions (books or online) for learning how to tune a piano would also be appreciated.
When I first started tuning pianos, I tried using Wikipedia's page on Piano Tuning. While that is a valuable resource, it was not (and still is not) a good tutorial. Later I got the book Piano Servicing, Tuning, and Rebuilding by Arthur Reblitz, which was much better, with instructions and exercises for learning to tune "aurally" (by ear). Learning to tune by ear is a big commitment, so lets move onto online tutorials for tuning with electronic tuners. Here are some of the ones I've found:
You can also find several non-free online tutorials and courses, and several decent videos on YouTube.
I've been tuning for over 20 years and I can still find room for improvement. When I had been tuning for about 3 or 5 years, one guild member told me that it takes about 10 years to get really good. Later, when I had reached that ten year mark, I thought back to what he had told me and I thought," yep, that's about right!" BTW, I'm much better than I was 10 years ago and I'll be better in 10 more years too. I've been keeping records since I've started tuning and I've got over 11,000 service records some with two or three pianos so I've probably tuned 15,000 pianos so far. After a while, you catch on but if you stick with it and learn from your PTG colleagues, you'll get there.
It depends on how you choose to learn. If you choose an inefficient method, you will never learn how to tune a piano well.
Current methods to learn piano tuning vary drastically in their effectiveness. Some people still recommend books that are over 100 years old to teach tuning.
I am very concerned with creating the best methods that reduce the piano tuning learning curve.
Mark Cerisano, RPT, B.Sc.(Mech.Eng.), Dip.Ed.(Music) howtotunepianos.com
I would suggest a different approach, than the most guys here.
If your piano sounds horrible, go for it, you won't make it worse.
There is plenty of software tuner that will guide you. It uses mobile phone microphone that can listen to the whole piano, key by key, and than compute how it should be tuned.
At that point a monkey could tune a piano.
It might not be perfect, but for a person who let this piano to be detuned like that I will most likely not be noticeable. For those who will hear the difference, you just need to dig deeper and fine-tune your work.
Guys seriously, piano is a simple machine, its not a car or rocket science. If you don't have both hands left (hope this idiom translates well), than you absolutely CAN do it. And you absolutely should.
Software can NOT tune clean unisons and have pitches stay. 150 lbs of tension on a steel pin in a flexible wood hole means the pin does not want to stay put friction at the v-bar means the string doesn’t behave nicely (force on the hammer does NOT equal a consistent change in pitch).
Pianos are not computers. They are organic and behave as such. Would you like to be raised by a computer? I think not. That is how the piano behaves when someone with no experience tries to tune a piano with software and no sense. Unisons all out of whack and sounding like salon piano after the first Firte five played.
Piano tuning is usually done by people with a visual impairment, often the blind. There is actually a tradeschool in Worcester that specifically teaches piano tuning to the blind. Having a good ear is but one part of it, you also need to be a first class woodsmith, have a good general music and piano knowledge and have the capabilities to run a workshop.
It is not something you do on a whim. It takes years of very specialist training to do it well and I'm not all that convinced a visually abled person is going to be able to excel at it. If you have perfect pitch, are excellent with your hands then you could try and contact a school in your area, but you may find this trade is specifically geared towards educating people who would be otherwise unemployable
