![]() When we speak of just/pure intervals, we are talking about the relationship between frequencies. Nevertheless, "just", "pure", and "perfect" happen to be the same when applied to octaves. "Just" and "pure" are synonyms while "perfect" has a different technical meaning in music. In equal temperament, octaves aren't merely perfect they are "just" or "pure". This may be true, but the practical reality for my cheap baby grand is that the backlash in the tuning pegs and the stability of each string's pitch doesn't allow such tiny adjustments to stay stable. I've seen claims that each unison should actually be slightly detuned, and that this affects the sustain of the tone. Over almost the entire keyboard, you can actually do fine just by tuning to an electronic tuner. ![]() The stretching of intervals is only desirable in the very high treble and very low bass, because those are the strings that have a significant amount of inharmonicity in their overtones. I believed these two claims until I actually started tuning my own piano. From a lot of the written descriptions you see out there, you'd imagine that (1) every interval on a piano was stretched by some fixed percentage, and also that (2) piano tuning has to proceed through a circle of fifths, tuning by ear using beats. This is not nearly as complicated as a lot of people would have you believe. what, exactly? The distance between the notes in the lower half of the piano? to get the octaves and fifths to agree with one another), a piano tuner lengthens the. (I'm not sure: which fifths? Like, the tonic of the second octave and the fifth of the third octave? Or is it the fifths in the sense that you play a note and then go +5, and then again +5, and so forth?) However, when you divide each octave into 12 semi-tones, and tune it mechanically, there's going to be a problem with the fifths. ![]() If you then play the same C and any other C, it'll still sound perfect. To one's ear, it is essentially the same note. There's no conflict between the two notes. When you play an octave on the piano (say, a C and the C following it), it sounds perfect. I've been trying to make sense of it all, and now I find myself thoroughly confused. One of the highlights of Bailey’s career was sitting down for a glass of orange juice with Fred Rogers after tuning his wife Joanne’s concert piano.I get the feeling that the actual explanation is a lot simpler than what the manuals and textbooks offer. “I really enjoy being around people and just meeting a diverse group of people, which is really kind of a fun thing.” Just getting into people's homes.” Bailey said. “The thing that I have enjoyed most is the people. He has had the pleasure of serving some customers for over 30 years. Every home had a piano in it, practically, but that's not necessarily the case these days."īailey says that his favorite part of the job are the people (and the pets) that he gets to interact with everyday. Anything that helps people enjoy being creative is a nice thing,” Bailey says, “But the desire to own an acoustic piano is not as great as it was, say back at the turn of the previous century, early 1900s. ![]() People were playing electronic and digital instruments now, which is perfectly fine. “The demand for piano tuning has fallen off because the piano sales have fallen off. Over the past decade, sales of upright pianos have dropped by 41.1%, while grand piano sales plummeted by 61.1%, according to the National Association of Music Merchants. Unlike acoustic pianos, they can sound like a sea of strings or a chorus of voices. Bailey calls a badly out of tune piano, “sounding like it’s drunk, because it’s just all over the place.”ĭigital pianos are lightweight, portable, and can be relatively affordable. “When we hear a string vibrate, we not only hear the fundamental pitch of the string that you note that you're playing, we hear the octave above that in the fifth above that in the fourth, and we can separate that individual frequency and sort of concentrate on just it.”Īural tuners discern whether or not a piano is in tune by listening to a string’s overtones - the tones that resonate above the fundamental pitch. “Aural tuners sort of hear frequency created by instruments, especially piano strings, the way a prism breaks down light into its spectrum,” Bailey said. He uses his grandfather’s tuning fork to aurally tune pianos for Heinz Hall, the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, local universities, and thousands of homes.Īural tuning is a technique where the tuners listen to the intervals between notes on a piano. Brian Bailey has been a piano technician in Pittsburgh for the past 37 years.
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