How to Train Your Ear - For Piano Tuners
We made an MP3 in this video to train your ear to discern between the different beat speeds of A4 and A5 in the interval, F2-Fork.
You can get it and use it to train your own ear. Just fill out the form below!
Ear training for piano tuners is entirely different than ear training for musicians.
"I have a good ear. I can play the piano by ear." These skills are valuable for musicians, but they have no bearing on whether or not you have the ear to tune pianos.
Piano tuners don't need to hear musical intervals or know what chord someone is playing. They need to hear partials, the quieter higher frequencies present in notes and intervals.
To hear those frequencies, the piano tuning student needs to put in the time to develop the ability to hear them because the brain needs to change, and that takes time.
But there are ways to speed up the learning.
Listening to those quiet frequencies filtered from the intervals, allows the student to know exactly what they should be listening for. We can't emphasize too much how powerful this is.
Watch the video above and learn how to make your own Piano Tuner's Ear Training MP3s.
The Problem:
Aural piano tuning is the act of tuning a piano by ear. Some apps tell the piano tuner where to place the pitch of each note, but they only get you so far. If you want to do the best tuning possible, you still need to develop your "Piano Tuner's Ear"
The piano tuner's ear is different than the musician's ear. The piano tuner must develop their ear so that they can selectively pick out the quiet beating of higher partials that are close but not equal. These frequencies set up "beats" - the pulsation of volume heard as a "wha wha wha" type of sound.
The common understanding is that the only way to develop your ear to hear these quiet beats is by focusing your listening and spending hundreds of hours trying to hear them.
While that is true, there are ways to speed up that process.
The Solution:
A "bandpass filter" is an electronic audio device or feature that eliminates unwanted frequencies and zeroes in on desired frequencies.
Bandpass filters are great for people wanting to develop their piano tuner's ear because they do what the piano tuner is trying to do on their own: filter out unwanted frequencies and zero in on the quiet beating frequencies.
Bandpass filters are new and not commonly used by schools and instructors, even though they have produced tremendous results in fast-tracking a student's ear so they can easily hear different beating frequencies at will.
The Ear Training Course for Piano Tuners uses bandpass filters to train the ear to hear specific beating frequencies at will.