Well, first off I have to admit that I can’t tune a piano. Number one obstacle being that I don’t own a piano, nor do I know anyone who does who would be foolish enough to let me try. Nor do I have the tools to do it, like a tuning fork, ( always something new to buy š )
or that Allen key with a tommy bar on the top, plus all the felt needed to replace any that’s missing, or the little wooden hammers, or the glue. All could be remedied by a quick tap on Amazon, and a short wait.
More importantly, I don’t have the know how, or the skill to tune a piano.
When I was a lad, piano tuning was quite a thing, we were at the tail end of the piano revolution when the height of Victorian status was an upright in the parlor. ( snigger, cough, sorry ). You couldn’t find a piano tuner easy enough, unless you lived in the sticks, and our local man, just up the road was Mr. Wooten. Now, Mr. Wooten was very old, and his wife not so much. I didn’t know much about him, except he was locally famous for something ( maybe he played back in the day ) before he went blind? Piano tuners were frequently blind people, or am I making that bit up? Anyway, thing was that Mrs. Wooten only had one hand. The other was a split hook that opened and closed, and it scared me, as she worked in the local shop and I had to go errands there.
Well, Mr. Wooten arrived with his bag of tricks and gave our old Joanna a good servicing .. so to speak, as he couldn’t give her a “seeing to” , if you get my drift.
I watched him with interest, I remember. This was something you didn’t see every day. It seemed to take a long enough time, and I still have the distant memory, but to get back to the original question, the answer is that it’s impossible. To tune a piano.
“Wait , wait ,wait”, I hear you cry, how come people are paying good money to someone to do the impossible, which would be a paradox anyway. If it’s just a matter of hitting the right frequency then surely there’s an app for that nowadays. And true enough. Although hitting the right frequency is not the problem. It’s that “yee canny change the laws of physics, Captain”, and this falls into the “stem subjects basket”.
I’ll now do my best to explain. ( Or go look on Wikipedia for yourself ).
Imagine a piece of string, or catgut, or wire or whatever. If you stretch it like in a guitar, violin, or piano, and pluck it, bow it, or hit it with a mallet, it will make a sound. This has been know for a few years now. Scientists believe its due to vibration of the string and indeed, harmonic motion is a well plowed row.
Now it you take a sting half as long it will vibrate at a frequency twice as high. That’s know as a octave, for reasons which are quite ironic, as you’ll see later.
Humans, ( and many pets ) find this a pleasing harmonic as the notes don’t beat on again the other. If two notes are “out of tune”, it can sound quite awful and you can hear a “beat” depending on how they differ. That’s how Mr. Wooten would have found his first note, by striking a tuning fork and listening for the beats while tickling the Allen key to get the string to the right pitch. Armed with one correct note the octaves could be tuned with reference to that note, or by the fork. So far, so good.
Now let’s think about the circle of fifths. A perfect fifth from C gets you to G. And a perfect fifth sounds very nice, just tune away the beats and you get the perfect fifth. So now carry from G. The next up is D. G to D is a perfect fifth. D to A, and so on, A to E and so on and that will bring us back to Doe. Or should I say “Doh!:, because it doesn’t. It’s slightly out. So when you get back to C and test it against where you stated it’s not an exact number of octaves away.
The piano will have been tuned in “just temperament”, and it should sound vey pleasing, except it will only play in the key of C. So if you don’t want more than one key signature, go for it. Problem comes when you play a duet with the person next door who has his or her instrument tuned in a different key.
In years back , like when people wore tall wigs, they would have a “box of viols” like little pianos tuned to different keys. Quite impractical.
Someone, at some time, invented the piano, and with it “equal tempering”, which was a big thing. Bach even wrote a bit of music about it. The modern era began.
So, what is a “well tempered clavier”?
It’s a compromise , so that each note is a bit out making 12 equally spaced sounds, 11 of them a bit out. To get the frequency of the next note up, multiply the current note by the 12th root of 2 ( think about it ).
I would have imagined Mr. Wooten would have used his skill and judgement to make the piano sound “sweet”, and indeed there were guidelines as to how to achieve this avoiding the “wolf frequencies”, so that there was even more of a compromise, the 12 keys would not be equally spaced, so that the “common keys” might sound sweeter.
A guitar player has a similar dilemma. So you may see them twigling the machine head for their next song to “drop the fifth” a shade to make the country music sound better. ( I actually do like a lot of country music , which drops my music cred like a hot brick).
A violinist can laugh at them as the violin has no frets, and the player wobbles their left hand anyway.
Brass instruments can be tuned, but valves give the piano problem, except the trombone, it has a slider.
Electronic music can “do anything”, as can the human voice, which
is why a choir sounds so angelic.
Now I’ve written enough, but there’s still a lot to say. Maybe in a future post.
Give this a viddy, then go tune something.