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Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, “Is there a standard for piano regulation?” The gut reaction, you’re probably all thinking is, of course, there must be a standard for piano regulation. I know this involves many precise measurements. I’ve got news for you, though. I’ve been around piano technicians my entire life. Some of my best friends are piano technicians! As a matter of fact, many of them, and I certainly depend upon them. Here’s the funny thing. I don’t care how great a piano technician is. Once they get done with a piano, you take another piano technician and they look at the work, how the regulation was performed, and they usually respond something like this, “Oh yeah, this is good, but I would take it down a little bit, and maybe a little bit higher, over here.” Everybody’s got their own ideas!

Is there a standard? Well, yes and no. Here’s the standard.

Yamaha has their specifications, for piano regulation. Steinway has theirs. There are little differences. There are some universals, certainly, but there are nuances of differences. Naturally, different pianos have slightly different geometry from one another. So, you can’t necessarily regulate every piano exactly the same. But perhaps even more significant is:

Every technician has slightly different ideas about regulation.

But I think the real key is this. Some pianos can be taken to a higher level of regulation than others. If things are really precise on a piano, you can take it to the edge of closeness where you know it’s still going to work and get optimal performance. But sometimes compromises are necessary. As a matter of fact, it’s typical that there are going to be some compromises in regulation because there’s no such thing as a perfect piano. You get something that has the best combination of power, speed, repetition fluency, control, and there are different ideas as to how to achieve that.

So, even though there’s a lot that piano technicians will agree upon, they all seem to have their own little nuances and preferences as to how things should be measured. Now, I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of comments on this one because there are technicians out there who may feel differently. I want to hear from you in the comments here in YouTube, and you can always contact us here at LivingPianos.com. Once again, we’re your Online Piano Store, providing good information. That’s why we bring these videos to you! So, if you have suggestions for future videos, keep them coming in and they’ll always be more for you, and you’re welcome to subscribe. Thanks again, Robert Estrin, here at Living Pianos.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Is there a Standard for Piano Regulation?

This is Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com with the question, “Can you learn to tune a piano online?” The whole world has moved online and people seem to be able to learn just about anything on the internet. Does this mean you can learn to tune a piano online too?

Actually, there are online resources for learning how to tune a piano!

First, let’s go back in time a bit. In the olden days (not so long ago!), most piano technicians learned their craft through apprenticeships. An established tuner would take somebody under their wing who had a desire and passion for tuning and piano repair. They would get to practice with some side work, and little by little be trained so that they could start to service some of their clients. Indeed, one of the best ways to learn the craft of piano tuning is through an apprenticeship if you are lucky enough to be able to hook up with someone. You might think that piano technicians would love to have the help from somebody who is eager to learn the craft. But, the amount of time it takes to train somebody can far outweigh the benefit a technician is going to get from the work of someone who is a relative newbie to piano tuning. Piano technicians’ schools are available online. You might consider looking at Piano Technician Academy:

Piano Technology Academy
https://www.pianotechnicianacademy.com/

They are a wonderful resource online where you can actually be certified as a Registered Piano Technician (RPT) through the Piano Technicians Guild (PTG). This enables you to prove to people that you have passed a certain level of proficiency in servicing pianos. There are other schools online, but I happen to know this one personally, and it’s a great place to learn. The North Bennet School https://www.nbss.edu/ allows you to physically attend to study the craft of piano tuning. But if you want to learn right in your own home, the Piano Technician Academy is a great resource. Having said that:

You obviously still have to work on actual pianos.

You can’t do it all online and be ready to go. You’ll need to have some pianos to work on, and in a perfect world, you’ll also have some kind of experienced piano technician who you can mentor with to some extent. An ideal situation would be the ability to take the best of the old world and the best of technologies and marry them together to learn the craft of piano tuning right at your own home with the help of somebody to guide you through to make sure you are on the right track. Thanks for the great questions I know there are a lot of people out there wanting to learn piano technician skills. If you are willing to travel:

There are areas of the country that have a dearth of piano technicians and the work opportunities are plentiful.

I happen to know this because Living Pianos sells pianos all over the country and we engage piano technicians from the Piano Technicians’ Guild. There are some areas with weeks of waiting lists of clients! I encourage any of you who want to get into this. It is a great skill to learn. You get to be around pianos, and you set your own hours which is why it is something that appeals to a great number of people. Once again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Can You Learn to Tune a Piano Online?

Hello, this is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. The question today is, “Can an out of tune piano have more sustain than a piano that is perfectly tuned?” The simple answer to this question is, believe it or not, yes! Here is an explanation of how and why this is.

If you look inside a piano you know that all the notes have more than one string except on the lowest notes. Most notes have three strings. If you know something about the acoustics of vibrating strings, you understand that if they are vibrating perfectly with one another you’ll get a certain level of sustain. But if one string is just ever-so-slightly out of tune, there will be a slow wave created. If that slow wave is about the same length of time or slightly longer than the sustain of that note, it will actually enhance the sustain of the note more than if it was absolutely dead-on in pitch!

I once talked to a piano tuner who claimed that they purposely de-tuned the piano precisely to get the maximum amount of sustain. I’ve talked to other piano tuners who said that this was total nonsense! My feeling is this: striving to tune a piano is hard enough. Once it is in tune, it is going out of tune little by little. Even if you tried to make the piano perfectly in tune, with every unison phase locked in perfect tune where they didn’t drift at all, in a very short amount of time, some of the notes will still drift slightly sharp or more likely flat. This would cause that slight detuning which could add sustain as long as the tuning doesn’t become so great that the wave cycle is shorter than the length the note sustains naturally.

Indeed, a slightly out of tune piano where the wave cycle is less than the sustain of the notes will sustain longer than a perfectly in tune piano. However, I wouldn’t try to de-tune your piano to get this effect. Believe me, it will de-tune itself soon enough just from playing it! Thanks for all the great questions and keep them coming in to:

info@LivingPianos.com
Your Online Piano Store.
949-244-3729

Can an Out of Tune Piano Have More Sustain?

Hello, this is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. The question today is, “Can an out of tune piano have more sustain than a piano that is perfectly tuned?” The simple answer to this question is, believe it or not, yes!

Let’s get some historical context to this question. When I was growing up, if we saw a piano tuner come into a home carrying a strobe tuner, and that’s all that was available at that time, well, you knew right away that you had basically an incompetent tuner. Why is this? Because the technology at the time wasn’t accurate enough to take into account so many aspects of tuning a piano, like stretch-tuning.

What is stretch-tuning?

If a piano is mathematically, perfectly in tune, it’s actually out of tune because your ears hear pitches in the high register flat. They have to be stretched. And the strobe tuner just does simple math, so it’s not going to sound right.

The technology has come a long way. Any really experienced tuner knows that you can’t tune a baby grand the same way you would tune a concert grand. In fact, each piano requires a different method of tuning. You may wonder, “Why is that?”

There’s something called overtones. The fundamental pitch, that is the pitch you hear when you strike a note, is only part of the sound, and there are overtones coloring the sound.

And those must also balance and mesh with other notes, so a small piano, for example, may have very strong overtones at a certain register, and those overtones have to sound good with fundamental pitches of higher notes. It’s very complicated.

How can machines possibly take that into account? By having virtual tunings of hundreds of first-class piano technicians, their models are loaded in the software. It’s possible to tune a piano with software like CyberTuner or TuneLab is another one. What they do is, first you punch in the size of the piano. The next thing is really interesting. It has you play all the octaves of the piano, one by one, so it hears where the piano is in pitch.

This is incredibly helpful because it can save vast amounts of time. Normally, if a piano is low in pitch, it takes a couple of passes, of pitch raises, because once you raise the pitch in one section, the other section goes out of tune, so it takes several tunings.

By playing all the notes of the piano, and it knows what size piano, it knows how much to stretch the tuning in different registers of the piano, so that by the time you’re done, it’s decently in tune. It’s pretty incredible technology.

Here’s the thing, though. Many tuners today use technology, but there are also tuners who tune completely by ear, and increasingly, I find that tuners utilize both because ultimately, there are decisions that can be made by a fine tuner, but checking the work and getting suggestions with the technology, nobody can complain about that, right?

If you think that maybe you can just take one of these software programs and be able to tune your piano, realize that not only is an arduous task, tuning a piano, but just setting the tuning pins and the strings so they’re going to hold, you’ve got to tune a lot of pianos in order to get to that point.

So you should have a healthy respect for your piano technician.

I hope this has been helpful for you. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

Can You Tune Your Piano with a Machine?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is, “How to Keep Your Piano in Tune.” There is nothing like a freshly tuned piano! This adds richness, beauty and purity to the sound. Once your piano tuner leaves and you get a chance to play it, it’s so refreshing! But before you know it, it’s going out of tune again. In a perfect world, we’d have live-in tuners who would tune our pianos daily. If I were a billionaire, I would definitely have one! Getting back to reality for a minute, are there things you can do to get your piano to stay in tune? Fortunately, there are quite a few things! I am going to touch bases on some of them for you.

The stability of the environment where the piano is located is crucial.

If you have a place where the temperature or humidity fluctuate drastically, the piano is not going to be stable. After all, the soundboard is made out of wood and the wood will expand and contract with the changes in the environment. The strings arc over the bridges which are attached to the soundboard. So any changes in the soundboard will affect the tuning.

How often should your piano be tuned?

Sometimes people go years without tuning their pianos not realizing that it will take several tunings to get them back to where they need to be. Usually a tuner will do two tunings right in a row just to get the piano up to pitch first, then do a fine tuning. Sadly, even that second tuning won’t hold very long. People who tune their pianos as many as four times a year or even monthly, may be rewarded with much more stability in the tuning of their pianos. But not if they play a great deal since this can knock pianos out as well.

In the recital hall at Indiana University, there were two Steinway concert grands on stage; an old Steinway and a newer Steinway. People would choose one or the other. The interesting and wonderful thing was that they were always perfectly in tune! How can this be? I touched on this a moment ago. I was friends with one of the tuners and learned that those pianos were tuned every single day! Apparently, it was rare for even one unison to go out on those pianos because they had been tuned daily for so many years that they just didn’t go out of tune anymore.

I recently had a similar experience. I inherited my father’s 7 foot Baldwin SF-10 that he bought new in 1972 and as I mentioned, he had his pianos tuned monthly. He also touched up unisons that would go out of tune between tunings. I have never owned a piano which is so stable. If you really want to get your piano to hold tuning well, tune it as often as you can and keep the environment as stable as possible.

What is Concert Tuning?

There are various techniques for getting a piano to hold better than just a regular tuning. I’m going to tell you one that is really fascinating. At one of my father’s recording sessions, there was a tuner who had a really interesting technique you may have never seen before. Some tuners play very lightly which is nice because it doesn’t blow you out of the room. Other tuners are more aggressive. This particular concert tuner had a block of wood with felt on it and he would bang every key on the concert grand while tuning. You would wonder if he was going to destroy the instrument! The whole idea was that after he was done tuning, my father could do anything on that piano and it would be very unlikely to go out of tune since it withstood the intense blows the tuner inflicted upon the piano. The technician sat there through the sessions and indeed, unisons would go out of tune in the course of the session with massive Rachmaninoff, Liszt and other pieces he was recording. But at least it had a fighting chance of staying in tune! At my father’s recitals, since he was such a powerful player with a huge dynamic range, the pianos would have to be touched up during intermission. So, at least at these recording sessions the pianos would hold their tuning longer.

The third thing here aside from providing a stable environment and tuning your piano often, is to find the best tuner you can. Ask for a concert tuning because different players require varying levels of tuning. Let your tuner know what you are after. You may pay a bit more to get top notch work, but the tuning should hold longer. So, there are several techniques for keeping your piano in tune longer!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

How to Keep Your Piano in Tune

Growing up in New York on Long Island, it was amazing; every summer trying to mitigate the humidity with air conditioning was a losing battle. By the middle of July, my father’s pianos would just get dead. Not only that, but the actions became mushy as they absorbed moisture. Indeed, the weather can affect your piano in numerous ways.

As I mentioned, humidity can deaden the tone because the hammers absorb moisture so you get a lifeless sound. The heat comes back in September and the tone livens up along with it. Everything is bound to go out of tune with these seasonal changes as well.

There’s another thing you should be aware of. At the opposite end of the spectrum, if you have extreme dryness where you don’t have environmental control; if you have hairline cracks in the soundboard or bridges, they can open up. Maybe you’ve never had problems before and suddenly you’re hearing buzzes and other problems. They might just go away next time the humidity goes up, or possibly not.

Weather has a profound effect upon pianos and even if you do have humidification or dehumidification systems in your piano, or in the room with the piano, it’s really hard to avoid the effect of seasonal changes on the performance of your piano. However, there are many ways of making it more stable such as treating the room to create stable temperature and humidity. You could possibly use a felt string cover to allow the sound to come through but not let the moisture in your piano.

We have to live with our pianos which are like living, breathing organisms. Treat them well and they will reward you richly! Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store 949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com