Today I ran up against a problem with tuning. I went to tune a piano which was very flat.
“Well Matthew,” you say “that should be nothing unusual, you must tune very flat pianos all the time!” And you’d be right. I very often go to a new customer’s house, am introduced to their piano, and when I go to tune the first string I find it’s very flat. At that point I will have a conversation with the customer about what they want to do. The two usual options are to spend a bit of extra time and money to bring it up to where it should be or to leave it where it is and to just tune it to itself. Often, due to the age or condition of the instrument, the second option is the only option.
This is all fine and normal and not a problem.
When I say that these instruments are very flat, I’m generally talking about a quarter, maybe a third of a semitone flat. It’s quite rare for me find a piano that is more than a semitone under.
Today I went to a new customer who had a piano that was almost a minor third flat. A minor third is a silly amount for a piano to be flat by.
To start with, the piano was so worn out that it’s a surprise that it’s still holding itself together, so there’s no way that it’s ever going to get back up to A440, tuning it to where it’s supposed to be is out of the question. Which leaves me to tune it to itself a minor third down. Which may sound simple, but it’s not. To tune a piano (at least if you’re doing it by ear, as I do) you start by tuning the middle octave, then work your way up and down in octaves. To tune the middle octave you carefully listen to things called beats (a noise you get when you play two notes together (sort of, it’s a bit more complicated than that, go and do some research if you’re interested)) and you try to get the beats to beat at the beat that beats should beat at. Beats. But beats beat at different speeds depending on what pitch they’re at. For example, when you play middle C and the E above it together they should beat at somewhere around 10.5 beats per second (ish). However, when you play the G and a B just below middle C (still a major third) you should get a beat beating at around 8.5 beats per second (ish). Slightly slower. You’ve probably worked out where I’m going with this. If a piano is half a semitone flat, the beat rates are a bit slower. A bit. A teeny tiny bit that isn’t really worth worrying about. However, if the piano is a minor third flat, this seriously affects what things sound like and my brain is thrown into turmoil and I don’t know which way is up and I can’t deal with it because the thing that should sound like one thing doesn’t and nothing fits anymore and what am I supposed to do!
After the mental breakdown I simply got out my phone and used an electronic tuner to get that pesky first octave in and everything was fine. And after all that, as I was halfway down the bass section, I realised that I could have just started at the Eb and pretended it was a C (I normally start with C) and I would have been fine doing that as well. Oh well, we live and learn.
In conclusion to this episode, don’t pick up free pianos. They’re more trouble than they’re worth.