It took me a couple of weeks to get a very stable tuning using a professional tuning hammer and a specialized app (entropy piano tuner and lately easy piano tuner). It is not that hard as piano technicians want you to believe!
I tune my own piano. Sure, I have proper tools, the right software and good hearing. But I have had to make a few mistakes along the way. Better to have failed at something than to have tried nothing.
There are some things that are too much of a headache to try unless it is your specialty for which you're being paid. I made the mistake of thinking piano tuning is as simple as tuning a guitar and it isn't. I don't have the skills to say, make sure the brakes on my car are working, so I pay someone who does. Same principle here; sometimes you have to just delegate.
I tune my own piano(prepare yorself) with a 10mil socket, a 10 mil Alan wrench and a 50cm metal square bar, hahahah, and I do a really good job, muting using a screwdriver with black tape wrapped around it, it is not by any means a good piano(spinet) but I do make ring beautifully at A444 hz Edit: 10 months later i have bought the proper tools to regulate and tune pianos and i do a cheap 60 dollars all around tuning and 100 for voicing and regulation and i have always recieved good feedback. Moral of the story: the worst you can do is break a few strings(i havent because i double check the tuning pin im on) and thats pretty much it, so if you have the proper tools(unlike me in the first 2 times) just go for it, install a good piano app to set the temperament, do relative(octave) tuning from the middle 12 notes, sure it takes a while but at the 3rd 4th times you get the hang of it(first time took me 4 hours and afte ther 5th i was down to 1:30-2 hours depending on how out of tune it was)
2:22 Octagonal head (not hex: 6 sides), as in two squares with one square rotated 45 degrees. Nonetheless, he answered my question about whether I want to try to tune my piano!
Honestly, it depends on how fussy you are and what your needs are. When I brought my piano home years ago it was two semi-tones flat and I brought it up to pitch gradually by myself without bothering to tune - I just wrenched it up a bit at a time and I didn't break anything. This was a financial savings. and didn't require any particular know-how. By using software, I was able to stabilize the piano tuning near the correct frequencies. I am confident now that if I hired a tuner, he could improve the tuning of my piano further and only charge me once.
Brilliant Robert! Just two points. Some technicians use Soft Blow Tuning - no hard blows. Also, we can never equalize all the segments. Just not possible physically. Too many termination points and friction. What we do is just worry about the top termination point and not equalize, but leave the non speaking length tension tighter then the speaking length.
Tuning a piano is a major pain in the ass. Especially if it hasn't been tuned in many years. Trust me, you will have to do it twice because the first time won't take. A pitch raise is a must for most pianos.
I tune my own piano. I am naturally good at most things, but this took a while to get good at. One thing I've learned is that digital tuners are only for setting the middle octave, after that, trust your ear.
Good video and some excellent points. I use a K&M tuning hammer just for the occasional slipped note........I leave the serious tuning to an annual visit from our local piano tuner.
I tune my own piano, but I often suffer at the short strings, the difference between strings and it's tone are hard to distinguish. But I get it it right sometimes.
It’s almost like teaching yourself how to do surgery then operating on a family member. I think there’s a reason tons of people aren’t bragging online about how easy this is. Even better i’m sure those who have tried have had to sheepishly to back to their technician to fix the mess
If you can tune a guitar, you can tune a piano! I did with a wrench from a Volks Wagen, first time. Now, much faster and precisely, I often do with electronic tuner within a couple of hours. Go for it, no fear, for fun. Enjoy it! But very importantly, you need quiet.
if you have an old piano just for fooling around with then tune it yourself, but if youre going to use the piano for recording or a recital you have to have it professionally tuned, it will cost about $150.
totally. it's obviously an octohead, not a hex head. the confusion has obviously arisen because sockets for hex heads come in 12-point varieties, and the two star patterns look very similar unless you count the corners. although i'll allow that there might be a technical reason for calling it "5-sided" ... it might be the number of positions the handle can occupy relative to the square hole, for example. too lazy to look it up, but this seems less obviously an error than the very wrong hex head thing
That's great to hear that you're already taking an initiative. There certainly is room for new technicians in the future as the average age of piano tuners is relatively high. If you keep working and continue to get good training, you can certainly learn to be a professional technician someday.
not a bad carreer considering you that piano tuners are literally dying out...last PTG meeting i went to literally 80% of them were over the age of 70 and only 2 new people one being me. There is a lot more to it than just tuning as there are a lot of engineering tasks that go into it as you to be a registered tuner you also have to be able to be able to change the tone of the hammers rebuild actions (which consist of thousands of parts in total) and a ton of woodworking experience.
Find your local chapter of the Piano Techicians Guild and go to a meeting. That's the best way to see what the business is all about. We're generally very friendly and love to have new people visit.
I was thinking about tuning my own piano since it's so hard to get someone to come out due to Covid, but I never would've imagined using pliers or a wrench 😂 If anything I thought maybe a socket wrench, but I assumed I'd have to get a tuning wrench from the get go.
I used a 7mm Allen bit with a 3/8 drive to attach to a ratchet, attached it to a breaker bar, and grabbed a 7mm socket with quarter inch drive and stuck the socket on the Allen key. That basically gave me the size I needed to slip over the square tuning pegs, as they were roughly a quarter inch in size. The reason why I didn't use a tuning hammer was because I didn't have the money to get my own, and the piano I was tuning was at my parent's house. I just used the tools they had and did a make shift tuning hammer of my own. I got pretty much every key perfectly tuned. Since it was an old, lower tier piano (a kimball from the 80's that wasn't maintained at all) I couldn't tune the ones at the very top perfectly. However, the rest of the piano sounds really nice. It's not hard, just very time consuming and you need a quiet house to tune it. If you got loud kids and stuff, you're gonna be hard pressed to tune the piano well enough to get the wavering between the strings out perfectly.
I tune my own piano never had courses or lessons or any ovlf that I just remembered the pitch and matched it with the key I wanted tuning then move to the fish and tune that
Ha Ha, He says you need a hex head wrench. Hex is six. A six-sided wrench wouldn't fit the square pins on a piano. As he holds it up to the camera, you can see it's an octagonal head - eight-sided. The pic is at 2:23. Of course his advice won't kill your effort because you can't buy a hex headed piano tuning wrench.
As a piano tech, thank you for clarifying this to people. While it is possible to tune a piano with minimal tuning experience, a correctly trained technician will *always* do better. As well as that, a machine tuning as opposed to an aural tuning, no matter how good the software, is inferior, the human ear can tune far more clearly and correctly. A machine tuning will make the piano sound in tune, an aural tuning will make the piano in tune. On the subject of online tuning courses... the less said about those the better, it's not something learnt by correspondence or alone. Even touching up unisons, rarely can a totally inexperienced person do them properly.
No you can absolutely do it with a machine with a microphone, that is able to focus in on the correct harmonics of 2 strings, and show you their beat rates. It isn't any better than your ears, but it isn't any worse. I always used just my ears, but as I age and I lose hearing in the higher registers, I'm thinking about getting a machine. You do need absolute quiet. It is very hard to tune a piano by ear in a noisy place. You will often have to wait for lulls in the noise. If there is too much noise, even a machine may have a hard time distinguishing the string from the noise. The job will take you longer. I can't tell you how many times I went to tune a piano at a bar or a restaurant, I told them to schedule me at a time when there is no-one there because I need quiet, and I'd get there and the place was busy, or it was empty but someone was vacuuming around me, and I got pissed off at them and left. Then I had to come back and try to tune it anyway because I got a call from the musician that was playing that night who would be saying he would "put a contract out on me" if the piano sounded out of tune when he got there. To be clear, I wasn't never threatened with murder; I was threatened with having my fingers broken, or with a gunshot that would damage my hearing.
There are so many details in tunning. I play piano for 30+ years and I am completely afraid of the damage I could make with such a simple tunning tool. Just the fact that there is no real "tuned" instruments (you mathematically distribute the frequencies error over a chosen kind of temperament, specially at the assymetrical temperaments) makes me give up. Better call a technician. Just to curiosity, for example, you can tune two strings in a perfect harmonic third, but the other intervals will be mathematically wrong. Better to have a slightly "wrong" third with the same error of the other intervals close enough to trick our ears - and call that a perfectly tuned piano (with the same amount of error in each string). On some digital pianos you can play around with the kinds of temperate tunnings. Good playing to all!
No, he doesn't. Piano pins are square, the tool "hammer" you should use to raise or lower the strings to pitch has what we call a "cheese head" in the automotive repair world, Audi uses these stupid sockets. The tool uses what theoretically is a "triple square," which is three squares rotated so you can basically grab the pin with traction from three different positions. Torque refers to the tightness the pins are set to, traction refers to the ability to "grab" the pins in a rotation.
You should tune every 12-18 months anyway so I don't feel that a professional will do any better. Worst comes to worse a DIY job will yield having to tune every 8 months.
There are electronic tuners that don't work, and electronic tuners that do. You need a device that you can use to home in on harmonics and show you their interference beats. Getting the machine to do that may take a bit of time, and so it may not help you get the job done any faster. It may only be useful if you have a hearing loss. I consider turning the pins and getting the string to vibrate at the pitch you want it, to be the most difficult part. Learning to hear beat rates can be a bit difficult but finessing the tuning pins so as to put the string in the right stpot is where the bottleneck is as far as learning to do a good stable tuning in less than 12 hours.
Piano Mark Hamill! Thanks for the tips. May the felt be with you.
It took me a couple of weeks to get a very stable tuning using a professional tuning hammer and a specialized app (entropy piano tuner and lately easy piano tuner). It is not that hard as piano technicians want you to believe!
You may have the gift. Although a tuner goes beyond the software and tweaks the tuning to the instrument itself.
I tune my own piano. Sure, I have proper tools, the right software and good hearing. But I have had to make a few mistakes along the way. Better to have failed at something than to have tried nothing.
There are some things that are too much of a headache to try unless it is your specialty for which you're being paid. I made the mistake of thinking piano tuning is as simple as tuning a guitar and it isn't. I don't have the skills to say, make sure the brakes on my car are working, so I pay someone who does. Same principle here; sometimes you have to just delegate.
I tune my own piano(prepare yorself) with a 10mil socket, a 10 mil Alan wrench and a 50cm metal square bar, hahahah, and I do a really good job, muting using a screwdriver with black tape wrapped around it, it is not by any means a good piano(spinet) but I do make ring beautifully at A444 hz
Edit: 10 months later i have bought the proper tools to regulate and tune pianos and i do a cheap 60 dollars all around tuning and 100 for voicing and regulation and i have always recieved good feedback. Moral of the story: the worst you can do is break a few strings(i havent because i double check the tuning pin im on) and thats pretty much it, so if you have the proper tools(unlike me in the first 2 times) just go for it, install a good piano app to set the temperament, do relative(octave) tuning from the middle 12 notes, sure it takes a while but at the 3rd 4th times you get the hang of it(first time took me 4 hours and afte ther 5th i was down to 1:30-2 hours depending on how out of tune it was)
2:22 Octagonal head (not hex: 6 sides), as in two squares with one square rotated 45 degrees. Nonetheless, he answered my question about whether I want to try to tune my piano!
Honestly, it depends on how fussy you are and what your needs are. When I brought my piano home years ago it was two semi-tones flat and I brought it up to pitch gradually by myself without bothering to tune - I just wrenched it up a bit at a time and I didn't break anything. This was a financial savings. and didn't require any particular know-how. By using software, I was able to stabilize the piano tuning near the correct frequencies. I am confident now that if I hired a tuner, he could improve the tuning of my piano further and only charge me once.
Brilliant Robert! Just two points. Some technicians use Soft Blow Tuning - no hard blows. Also, we can never equalize all the segments. Just not possible physically. Too many termination points and friction. What we do is just worry about the top termination point and not equalize, but leave the non speaking length tension tighter then the speaking length.
Tuning a piano is a major pain in the ass. Especially if it hasn't been tuned in many years. Trust me, you will have to do it twice because the first time won't take. A pitch raise is a must for most pianos.
I tune my own piano. I am naturally good at most things, but this took a while to get good at. One thing I've learned is that digital tuners are only for setting the middle octave, after that, trust your ear.
Good video and some excellent points. I use a K&M tuning hammer just for the occasional slipped note........I leave the serious tuning to an annual visit from our local piano tuner.
You are invaluable source of information. Thank you
I tune my own piano, but I often suffer at the short strings, the difference between strings and it's tone are hard to distinguish. But I get it it right sometimes.
So...using my DeWalt Hammer Drill with an impact strength socket wrench is a BAD idea?
It's an oct head. But yeah, after trying once, I realise how important a good tuning hammer is.
it is not how many pianos you tune but rather the technique you use. For better stability going low to high is best
It’s almost like teaching yourself how to do surgery then operating on a family member. I think there’s a reason tons of people aren’t bragging online about how easy this is. Even better i’m sure those who have tried have had to sheepishly to back to their technician to fix the mess
Thanks for providing a great explanation to a seemingly simple question.
If you can tune a guitar, you can tune a piano! I did with a wrench from a Volks Wagen, first time. Now, much faster and precisely, I often do with electronic tuner within a couple of hours. Go for it, no fear, for fun. Enjoy it! But very importantly, you need quiet.
Joss Dionne And it's people such as yourself that give technicians lots of good business once something goes wrong.
Great explained with great experience!
You didn't mention octave stretching. Why not?
if you have an old piano just for fooling around with then tune it yourself, but if youre going to use the piano for recording or a recital you have to have it professionally tuned, it will cost about $150.
Amen!
Still I’m afraid.... but I need to tune mine so bad....!
Hi , can you please do a follow up video on : How to touch-up your piano
good advice Robert (45year tuner)
2:20 ... A 5 sided hex head that has 8 points huh? Where do I find such an oddity?
totally. it's obviously an octohead, not a hex head. the confusion has obviously arisen because sockets for hex heads come in 12-point varieties, and the two star patterns look very similar unless you count the corners. although i'll allow that there might be a technical reason for calling it "5-sided" ... it might be the number of positions the handle can occupy relative to the square hole, for example. too lazy to look it up, but this seems less obviously an error than the very wrong hex head thing
I'm only fourteen, and I'm already tuning pianos, do you think I could have a future in the buissness?
No
Jay Clifford . Pretty good money. Need good ear, you know...and good pianos. Good luck! Perfect side-line job, anyway!
That's great to hear that you're already taking an initiative. There certainly is room for new technicians in the future as the average age of piano tuners is relatively high. If you keep working and continue to get good training, you can certainly learn to be a professional technician someday.
not a bad carreer considering you that piano tuners are literally dying out...last PTG meeting i went to literally 80% of them were over the age of 70 and only 2 new people one being me. There is a lot more to it than just tuning as there are a lot of engineering tasks that go into it as you to be a registered tuner you also have to be able to be able to change the tone of the hammers rebuild actions (which consist of thousands of parts in total) and a ton of woodworking experience.
Find your local chapter of the Piano Techicians Guild and go to a meeting. That's the best way to see what the business is all about. We're generally very friendly and love to have new people visit.
This is the question I was looking for recently! Thank you!
Mohamed AlNajjar nice to see you here. You have taste ;)
Thank you so much!
Although, the "hard-blow" method isn't the only way. 🤔
Can you just tug on the string?
I was thinking about tuning my own piano since it's so hard to get someone to come out due to Covid, but I never would've imagined using pliers or a wrench 😂 If anything I thought maybe a socket wrench, but I assumed I'd have to get a tuning wrench from the get go.
I used a 7mm Allen bit with a 3/8 drive to attach to a ratchet, attached it to a breaker bar, and grabbed a 7mm socket with quarter inch drive and stuck the socket on the Allen key. That basically gave me the size I needed to slip over the square tuning pegs, as they were roughly a quarter inch in size. The reason why I didn't use a tuning hammer was because I didn't have the money to get my own, and the piano I was tuning was at my parent's house. I just used the tools they had and did a make shift tuning hammer of my own. I got pretty much every key perfectly tuned. Since it was an old, lower tier piano (a kimball from the 80's that wasn't maintained at all) I couldn't tune the ones at the very top perfectly. However, the rest of the piano sounds really nice. It's not hard, just very time consuming and you need a quiet house to tune it. If you got loud kids and stuff, you're gonna be hard pressed to tune the piano well enough to get the wavering between the strings out perfectly.
The tuning hammer you want has a removable star head.
Didn't know I would be learning about piano tuning from Mark Hamil
I tune my own piano never had courses or lessons or any ovlf that I just remembered the pitch and matched it with the key I wanted tuning then move to the fish and tune that
I don't have an 88 Key piano but i have a 61 key piano psr e 253
The socket he shows is a Torx head not a hex.
Ha Ha, He says you need a hex head wrench. Hex is six. A six-sided wrench wouldn't fit the square pins on a piano. As he holds it up to the camera, you can see it's an octagonal head - eight-sided. The pic is at 2:23. Of course his advice won't kill your effort because you can't buy a hex headed piano tuning wrench.
haha, thanks for telling everyone! I didn't even get this real
As a piano tech, thank you for clarifying this to people. While it is possible to tune a piano with minimal tuning experience, a correctly trained technician will *always* do better. As well as that, a machine tuning as opposed to an aural tuning, no matter how good the software, is inferior, the human ear can tune far more clearly and correctly. A machine tuning will make the piano sound in tune, an aural tuning will make the piano in tune. On the subject of online tuning courses... the less said about those the better, it's not something learnt by correspondence or alone. Even touching up unisons, rarely can a totally inexperienced person do them properly.
No you can absolutely do it with a machine with a microphone, that is able to focus in on the correct harmonics of 2 strings, and show you their beat rates. It isn't any better than your ears, but it isn't any worse. I always used just my ears, but as I age and I lose hearing in the higher registers, I'm thinking about getting a machine. You do need absolute quiet. It is very hard to tune a piano by ear in a noisy place. You will often have to wait for lulls in the noise. If there is too much noise, even a machine may have a hard time distinguishing the string from the noise. The job will take you longer. I can't tell you how many times I went to tune a piano at a bar or a restaurant, I told them to schedule me at a time when there is no-one there because I need quiet, and I'd get there and the place was busy, or it was empty but someone was vacuuming around me, and I got pissed off at them and left. Then I had to come back and try to tune it anyway because I got a call from the musician that was playing that night who would be saying he would "put a contract out on me" if the piano sounded out of tune when he got there. To be clear, I wasn't never threatened with murder; I was threatened with having my fingers broken, or with a gunshot that would damage my hearing.
There are so many details in tunning. I play piano for 30+ years and I am completely afraid of the damage I could make with such a simple tunning tool. Just the fact that there is no real "tuned" instruments (you mathematically distribute the frequencies error over a chosen kind of temperament, specially at the assymetrical temperaments) makes me give up. Better call a technician. Just to curiosity, for example, you can tune two strings in a perfect harmonic third, but the other intervals will be mathematically wrong. Better to have a slightly "wrong" third with the same error of the other intervals close enough to trick our ears - and call that a perfectly tuned piano (with the same amount of error in each string). On some digital pianos you can play around with the kinds of temperate tunnings. Good playing to all!
Very well put, mr Estrin.
Robert is so full of knowledge and laughs.
"...Traction..."? I wonder if you mean torque?
No, he doesn't. Piano pins are square, the tool "hammer" you should use to raise or lower the strings to pitch has what we call a "cheese head" in the automotive repair world, Audi uses these stupid sockets. The tool uses what theoretically is a "triple square," which is three squares rotated so you can basically grab the pin with traction from three different positions. Torque refers to the tightness the pins are set to, traction refers to the ability to "grab" the pins in a rotation.
A hex is 6 sided
He says "hex head", then "five-sided head". Very confusing and wrong since the head must have 8 sides. "Octo head" ?
It's a triple square.
And certainly don't try tuning a Blüthner with the aliquot unless you know what you're doing!
Luke... Use the force to tune it!
You should tune every 12-18 months anyway so I don't feel that a professional will do any better. Worst comes to worse a DIY job will yield having to tune every 8 months.
I am a guitarist 😂
46 year piano tech here maybe tuned 0ver 50,000 pianos,,You just have to tune a lot to get good.
'Exactly! There are no shortcuts.
Or just go digital!
Gosh are you dumb. Learn to get some spirit.
How to tune a piano,
Sell it buy a keyboard
Don't use a tuner. Just don't it doesn't work.
There are electronic tuners that don't work, and electronic tuners that do. You need a device that you can use to home in on harmonics and show you their interference beats. Getting the machine to do that may take a bit of time, and so it may not help you get the job done any faster. It may only be useful if you have a hearing loss. I consider turning the pins and getting the string to vibrate at the pitch you want it, to be the most difficult part. Learning to hear beat rates can be a bit difficult but finessing the tuning pins so as to put the string in the right stpot is where the bottleneck is as far as learning to do a good stable tuning in less than 12 hours.