Transcription
A few of you have asked, "How do I tune a piano? How do I tune my own piano?" A good place to start is learning how to tune up the unison strings on one note. I've got Landon here with me, who's done this before a little bit, but he's just getting into it. We're going to go through an exercise that I recommend to get familiar with it.
First thing you're going to need is a tuning hammer. Here, I'll give that to you. Let's go ahead. This is a mute. This is a felt mute. You could use rubber. You could use a felt strip, a few other things. Let's go ahead and work with middle C, Landon. So, where is the... let me see that on the damper. What note are we on? Okay, so we're going to isolate the left string by sticking this mute in between the two. Right now, always hit the pedal, Landon, before you insert this or play the note, and the damper lifts. Then insert it so that you don't pinch the felt wedges and cut them. The very soft, tender damper felt that's right there, that's stopping the sound. We've got to be careful of that. Okay, so listen to one string. It's a very clean, straight sound, right? I'm... I'm going to isolate the two left strings. We're listening to the left string against the middle. Let's hear what it sounds like. So, it has a little bit of a meow to it. But go ahead and put your hammer on that tuning pin, Landon. Let's show them on the left string now. Play the note so we can hear the pitch change and just kind of ease it flat until it's really obviously out of tune. That's very, very obviously out of tune, right? So it has a one-one to it. Okay, now Landon's going to easily, just by really slow degrees, pull it up. Did you hear that lock in? That's a good sound. Play it again. Now isolate the left string. Let's compare the sound of one string to two. One string here. Now the sound of the two strings that he tuned together. You hear how they sound very similar? Yeah, compared to where we were. Let's do that again. Let's just do it one more time. Let's... let's catch... let's catch that again, that same exercise. Okay, clearly out of tune, right? So go ahead and pull it up. So you heard that click. That was the pin actually rotating there in the hole, but it looks probably a little bit sharp. So it's still, we still hear some pulsing. Go ahead and play it. Hear...
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That. Okay, Landon's going to massage it down. Oh, it's actually flat. So we need to go up a little more. There it is, locked into place again. That's all there is to it. It's pretty simple in a way, but very hard in practice. This is the element of tuning that takes, you know, five, ten years to really get good at till you can do it at a concert level.
Here's another exercise that I want to show you with Landon at the keyboard. So now, Landon, play. I'm going to... um... Okay, you go out of the room, Landon, just real briefly, and I'm going to detune a note and see if you can pick it out. Okay? Okay. So the note I'm playing, just in case he hears the note I'm playing, I'm going to detune a different note from that, just try to see if I can throw them off. So we'll...
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See. I'm playing A3, but I'm actually detuning D for A3 and...
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D4. Okay, Landon, come on back in. Landon's back now. Landon, I want you to play, um, like from F3 to F5, a scale, and see if you can pick out what note I detuned. It should be pretty obvious, but when you're starting this out, it's maybe not so obvious. So, okay, the D there. Okay, that's D4. Okay, so let's fix that. Okay, so let's pretend now I detuned the outside string. Let's pretend that, um, the middle string's in tune. So tune the one that's out of tune to the middle...
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...string. Here, let's really quick, here, pull that damper up. Push the key. Yeah, that. Listen. These two, we'll pluck them. Don't play it. I'm going to pluck it. Can you hear a difference in pitch there? A little bit. Yeah, it's just really subtle, right? Very subtle. Here, put the pedal back down, but just hold the key down, yeah, so that the damper stays up so it rings. So the left one is off from the middle. So go ahead and tune those up. Make sure your hammer's on the right pin. That's one of the biggest things there. Okay. Okay, so the beat, the beating got faster as he went to the flat side. So we know that it was already flat and it got worse, right? The slower the activity, the closer you are to in...
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...tune. Okay, Landon's been practicing. That's really awesome. Were you able to do that after our first little lesson of this? No, it's been a while, right? You've had some practice. How much practice have you had, would you say? Um, maybe like 10, 15 hours, something like that. So, yeah, so you're not going to pick this up in a weekend. So go ahead and play that note again, Landon. It just really quick. Okay, that's the sound of two unisons in tune. Thanks.
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