Watch Lesson 2 and Lesson 3 and then Take the Quiz
Video Transcription
Welcome to my online video course - How to Get Superior Stability in Piano Tuning. I'm Mark Cerisano, Registered Piano Technician.
It has been said that the number one priority in piano tuning is clean unisons. If you're ever going to be called back to fix your tuning, it will probably be for unisons that are not clean. People can hear out of tune unison's much easier than they can hear out of tune fourths and fifths, for example.
Most of the piano notes consist of three strings tuned to the same pitch. These are called trichords. If one string of a trichord drifts, Whammo! No more clean Unison! That's why our tunings must be stable, as well as accurate. A beautiful tuning that is not stable is destroyed by the first loud song played.
In each of these situations a string has changed pitch due to hard and loud playing. We can't ask players not to play loud, so we have to learn how to tune pianos so they do not go out of tune, even during the hardest and loudest of playing.
In order for us to understand how to produce stable tunings, we need to understand why a string goes out of tune in the first place.
When I ask people, even professional piano technicians, why they think the string that goes out of tune, I get a lot of different answers;
- The string segments tensions were unequal
- The pin wasn't set
- The string wasn't set
- The hammer wasn't at 12:00, and so on.
Answers like these indicate a certain lack of understanding of what's going on at the core of the issue. These answers refer to techniques that the tuner may have been taught, techniques that most likely included comments like, “Do this, and your tunings will be stable.”
But these answers are wrong because they don't indicate a truth that exists 100% of the time. The truth is, a string goes out of tune because it has slipped across the upper termination point, like the V-bar or agraffe. That's it. This is the truth, every single time, all the time, every time.
Those other answers may be true in some cases, but we want to produce stable tunings all the time, every time, and on all pianos, all strings, right?
Therefore, we need to look at the core reason why strings go out of tune during hard playing, and that reason is because, the string slips across the upper termination point 100% of the time.
Figure out why that happens, figure out how to stop it from happening, and you've got yourself a stable tuning that remains stable all the time, every time, on all pianos, and that's what we're here to do. So, keep listening and we'll find out exactly how to get the stable tuning you want all the time, every time, on every piano.
