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Have you ever tuned a pitch raise, only to call the customer back and they say, “Your tuning was very poor so we asked someone else to come and retune it. They were much better than you.”?

This is a good reason for tuners to learn how to do the best pitch raises possible. Lately I have been using Double String Unison, P4 windows, and Parallel Octaves to do decent pitch raises in one pass.

Double String Unison (DSU) is a method of tuning a piano where the tuner mutes only one string and then tunes the other two until they sound good.

The two strings of a DSU are tuned together until they sound as a pure beatless unison, then the DSU is compared to another pitch. The comparison tells the tuner whether the DSU is good, or needs to be raised or lowered. The tuner then detunes the DSU by moving one string in the direction they want to change the DSU, then follows with the other string until the DSU is clean again, and then the comparison is made again until the tuner is happy.

There are many many advantages and pros to using the DSU method to tune a piano. The full DSU method I use involves a lot of peripheral techniques that make DSU very powerful.

Two such techniques are using the P4 window and using parallel octaves. DSU with these techniques allow me to perform an exceptionally good pitch raise in one pass!

The P4 window is a technique where I fit a M3, M10, and M17 into a P4. The M3 is used as a reference. The M17, P4 test creates a tempered or pure 12th. But it is the M10 that catches any drifting that may have occurred. This helps to “clean up” the tuning as I go along.

The parallel octaves are a method where I use two mutes as a DSU, one at the M10 and one at the M17. For a pitch raise, the M10 will always need to be corrected as one moves up the keyboard.

I also use the 8:4 window below the temperament, which is similar to the P4 window. The 8:4 window reaches up to E6 as we go down, creating clean single, double, and triple octaves, and correcting any drifting notes as I go along.

In this way, many notes are tuned three, four, and five times, before they are used as references to tune other notes. In this way, the tuning is much more efficient; there is much less cumulative error.

I recently tuned a K. Kawai grand piano that needed a pitch raise. I tuned it in one pass using this method.

Here is a recording of A#3 where one string is tuned and the other is original. This shows the pitch raise was from 436Hz.

Out of tune A#3 showing the size of the pitch raise; 4 beats per second at the fundamental.

Here is a recording of me playing an excerpt from Claire de Lune by Debussy and Giant Steps by John Coltrane after the tuning. I am 100% serious when I say that there was no tweaking of any notes whatsoever after the first pass. This is not that surprising if you understand how DSU, the P4 window, the 8:4 window, and parallel octaves all work together to result in many many retuning of notes within that one pass.

(My apologies beforehand for the poor performance.)

Claire de Lune – Debussy and Giant Steps – Coltrane

Note: The point of this post is not to show how someone can create a perfect tuning with only one pass. (I heard some bass octaves that were rolling) Nobody can do that, and achieving a perfect tuning is a challenge at the best of times. The point is that it is possible to create a reasonably good tuning with only one pass using these techniques.

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