Posts from — September 2009

As a highly-respected piano tuner-technician, this is a subject near & dear to my heart. Yet, it is also one of my shorter posts, because choosing a tuner is so straightforward.

First, never, ever, choose a tuner on price alone. In every technical field, you get what you pay for, and that’s especially true of piano technicians. And it’s just not that much more expensive to choose a reputable expert over a cut-price hack. Maybe you’ll spend an extra $20-30. Is your instrument worht it?

Second, don’t skimp on frequency, don’t choose to wait a couple years in between tunings. I’m assuming you are one of those piano owners who really cares about your instrument, no matter how fine or humble, or you wouldn’t have read this far. Whether your piano cost $1000 or $100,000, spending a couple hundred bucks every year to keep it maintained should feel like a very modest, no-brainer investment to keep it functioning properly. Obviously, if your family is going through a period where no one plays the piano anymore, you’ll be tempted to let it slide. But it will go out of tune and adjustment on its own, just sitting there, and when piano-playing interest is renewed, you’ll find yourself spending much, much more to tweak it back into shape. It’s less expensive just to keep it up each year.

With those first two points in mind, choosing the right tuner-tehchnician is simple. Just find the best, most highly-recommended and reputed tuner in your area, have him come to your piano, trust him when he describes its current condition and what it needs, and pay him whatever he asks. That’s it!
If he’s that highly reputed, he’s not going to gouge you or take advantage of your lack of techincal piano knowledge by recommending work your piano doesn’t need. Believe me, it takes a long time to build up that kind of fine reputation, he cherishes it, and he’s not going to risk losing all that just to make a few extra bucks off you. Plus, if he’s that good, most likely he has plenty of work and doesn’t need to gouge any of his customers.

There are two ways to discover the best tuner in your area. One way is to use a tuner who is a member of the Piano Technicians Guild, a non-profit organization that puts each applicant through stringent testing to determine their level of skill. So if the tuner has a Piano Technicians Guild card, or the PTG insignia on their business card, you can usually rest assured they are a competent tuner-technician. Usually, but not always.

An even better way is to simply ask the fine pianists and piano owners in your area, who they use. Don’t be shy, call the top piano teachers, local concert artists, or anyone you know who owns an expensive Steinway or Bosendorfer, and find out who they use. Better still, if you live in a city that has major recording studios, where important music is recorded, ask them. Recording studios are perhaps the most finnicky about perfectly tuned pianos, because their pianos are often played by major artists, and the notes played are going to be presevered for posterity and heard by many thousands or millions, so it has to be perfect.

In my early years as a tuner, I got called into a major recording session (for the brass-rock group Chicago) simply because their normal tuner was out with the flu, and I was the first tuner who answered the phone as they went down the list in the Yellow Pages. I tried to do my best tuning, got payed, and went home thinking, “Well that was a lucky fluke.” Three months later, I got a call from Elton John’s road manager saying, “We need Elton’s piano tuned for 2 concerts at the Cow Palace, and we hear you’re the best tuner in Chicago.” Wow! Someone from the band Chicago had recommended me, and that was the start of a career tuning for many fine artists, concert halls and recoirding studios. Tuners: always do your best wok, and piano owners: simply find and hire the best available!

As mentioned previously, you should have an expert tuner-technician come out at least twice a year to take care of the inside of your piano – tuning, regulating, voicing and replacing of any worn out parts.

But taking care of the outside of your piano is your job, and it’s relatively simple.

Most pianos need only dry dusting, no polishes, to keep the furniture looking just fine. Occasionally, there will be oily fingerprints and other dirt tat won’t come off with dry dusting. In that case, just take two gentle-fabric wiping cloths (the best is those micro-fibre cloths), dip one in a little water with a few drops of gentle soap, and wring it out almost dry. Use the damp soapy one to rub off the offending spots, then immediately wipe away the dampness with the dry cloth and you’re done.

Pianos have two types of outer finishes. The original finish-of-choice was lacquer, and most good pianos were sprayed at the factory with several coats of high-quality lacquer, which was then hand-rubbed to the desired sheen. This is still the common choice in American pianos.

In the last few decades, Japanese and European piano manufacturers switched over to a much harder finish called polyester. You can spot these finishes on Japanese and European pianos right away, as they are ultra-glossy, wet-look finishes. They are difintely shinier and more durable then lacquer, but much harder to both apply and rub out. Polyester is so toxic, the finishers applyng it must wear full haz-mat suits.

However, polyster will not check and crack into that “alligator skin” look, the way lacquer will after a few decades or after exposed to a lot of sun and dryness. And the finish is hard enough that if you can even use a little Windex on a cloth to rub off stubborn spots.

You can clean dirty keys (they will definitely get oily and dirty after hours of play) with a dry cloth, or for a deeper clean, with an all-purpose spray cleanser. My favorite is Formula 409. It’s important to spray the cleaner on the cloth and wipe, NOT spray directly on the keys. Formula 409 will work on both plastic (after 1960) and ivory (pre-1955) keys, and harm neither.

That’s really all you have to do to care for your piano. Your tuner will do everything else, including inner cleaning. Especially in grand pianos with the lids raised, the piano will definitely collect a layer of dust on the soundboard. DO NOT try to vaccum this up yourself, you could damage the strings and dampers. Your tuner has special tools to clean under your strings, leave that to him/her.

Finally, avoid alowing direct sunlight to hit your piano for any extended period of time. Even an hour a day is too much. Appraise the position of your piano and the windows of that room, to see how much sunlight hits your piano directly, throughout the various seasons. If your piano is in a spot where it would be subject to direct sunlight for any extended period of time, either hang window coverings tha will block oout the sun during those hours, or keep your piano covered with one of the many form-fitting canvas or quilted covers available from piano dealers or your technician.

 As mentioned in our posts about early Western music’s evolution, originally there was no harmonic music, as in, two or three notes sang together, or melodies played over accompanying full block chords. Monks chanted Latin hymns, one note at a time, up and down the scale, with nary a third or a triad.

Singing a pleasant string of single notes was as natural as breathing, and probably dated back to pre-history. But when humans started singing or playing instruments in harmony, things got a little more complicated. In order to understand why, we need to take a look at the "mathematics" of the musical scale. Enter our old buddy, Pythagoras.

History teaches us that up until the great Greek philosopher, mathematician and scientist, Pythagoras of Samos, conceived and wrote down his mathematical formula for musical note frequencies, no one had any idea of the mathematical relationships of notes on a scale. But Pythagoras noticed that a note exactly one octave above another note was created by trimming a sounding device, either human vocal chords or a string, to exactly half it’s current length.

This set him off developing the mathematical relationships of the entire musical scale. He was the first to declare a scale made up of 12 equally-spaced semi-tones, pre-defining the 12 tones we now see on a piano, going from any note to the note exactly one octave higher (like C3 to C4.)

As harmonic and chordal music evolved, including the singing & playing of pieces many various keys, an interesting mathematical rule presented itself. If you wanted to sing or play instruments in any potential key, and have all the 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, etc. sound in proper relationship to each other, mathematically you needed 26 "semi-tones" to each octave. The G# in a major E chord (E-G#-B) needed to be a totally different note than the Ab in an Ab major chord (Ab-C-Eb).

This was no problem for singers and other instruments, like the violin or wind instruments, that only played one or two notes at a time. Whenever switching through various songs in various keys, the singers or players compensated by slightly shifting their voice or finger-position or wind pressure to hit the proper frequency for that key. A violin player in an orchestra unwittingly move their finger position just slightly to make a G# or an Ab, respectively.

But then some silly dudes started inventing keyboard instruments that could play whole chords and melody with two hands. Based on Pythagoras’ 12-tone scale, they invented the modern-shaped octave, with twelve white-and-black keys. Trouble is, music was evolving and concerts were now featuring pieces in several different keys, instead of playing every song in the key of C or G (which got boooooring!) but as we discovered, if you were going to play in multiple keys, you needed up to 26 notes to hit every note at it’s pure frequency. And that was just too many keys to an octave. You would have t build a piano twice as wide, or with just 3 octaves instead of 7, to hold all those keys, and no one, not even the biggest-handed pianist, would be able to stretch to play an octave.

So, instead a compromise was reached. The keyboard would remain just 12 notes to an octave, but the piano strings would be tuned just slightly off of "pure" pitch for any interval except the octave, to compensate for moving around through many keys in a concert. That compromise was called "tempering" the musical scale, and over the centuries, many different temperaments were tried, falling in and out of favor. By the modern era, the compromise called the "equal temperament" was settled on, and became the temperament of choice for all modern orchestras and players. Thus, our 20th and 21st Century ears have gotten used to the "equal temperament", and that’s the amount of space between the notes that sounds "right" to our brains.