But the tuning part... Well, this is where the rubber hits the road. There is no amount of steel wool, cleaning agent, stain, you name it, that will make this work out well if you don't or can't do it right. Or if the foundation that you're working on will not support what you want to do - and I'd been told that this is the danger all along. Bad design, bad foundation. Well, we'll see. This is probably the Tipping Point between hope and reality.
With that in mind, I contacted my friends at the Piano Owner's Service Guide(http://www.stevespianoservice.com/) to order a piano tuning kit. I got the Standard Tuning Kit (http://www.stevespianoservice.com/Online-Piano-Parts-Catalog/piano-tuning-tools-and-kits.htm) with a couple of extras, and that came with the CD, a piano restoration manual, and a whole bunch of really cool tools.
You will notice that there are no CDs or manuals in that picture. Yes, I have them. No, I have not looked at them. I hate manuals. Can't help it, that's the way I was made. At some point, I'm pretty sure I will either a) regret this predilection, b) be forced to consult the written documentation, and/or c) both of these things. But, for now, I get how this works, I think; I understand how these tools work, I think... And I really want to see if I actually do.
I will say this up front. I will never, never, EVER again bitch about tuning my 12-string guitar. Never. The process that I went through just to get this damn piano in tune with itself is a whole new scale of pain and torture, compared to any kind of guitar tuning.
I'm guessing this is where this blog is going to get a whole lot more boring and a whole lot less visual. There's not a whole lot of pictorial stuff that goes into trying to tune a piano. I will do the best I can...
The first thing I did was get my chromatic guitar tuner.
The second thing I did was turn it on and place it on the keyboard (yes, the piano is once again in pieces, much to the chagrin of my wife, who likes to look at the prettiness of the outside).
The third thing I did was to strike the middle "C" key.
The fourth thing I did was begin to weep. Middle "C" registered as a flat "F#" on the good old chromatic guitar tuner.
For the uninitiated, this means that - at best - this piano is at least 3 1/2 steps (C to B to A to G to barely F#) below the tuning pitch that it should be. By any stretch of the imagination, this cannot be a good thing.
However, I bucked up my spirits, dried my eyes (not really), and decided that the first order of business was to get the piano in tune with itself. And get middle C to the closest major note, upward, that was in the immediate neighborhood. Since I was looking at something in the area of F#, I decided that going to G would be a good first step.
Armed with my chromatic tuner, a good set of rubber mutes, a really good red felt mute strip on the lower keys, I set out to get the first octave into the key of G.
Yes, you can see the tuner in the middle of that picture.
It took me a bit to figure out the mutes. Basically, at least on this piano, there are two strings per note. In order to get them both in tune, you have to wedge the mute in between the second string and the string of the next pair, thus muting the second string of the pair you are trying to tune.
Then, using the tuning wrench and the chromatic tuner, you get the first string to the pitch you want it to be - in this case, we're starting with G.
Then you remove the mute, forget the tuner, and tune the second string so that it is in tune with the first string. This is where tuning a 12-string guitar actually comes in handy. The concept is the same.
Once you have THAT string pair in tune, you move on to the next pair and repeat the process. And you repeat that process for every string pair (G - since we're starting there, G#, A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#) in the octave.
And that's where the fun starts. If you count the octaves in the picture above, you will find that there are 6 1/12 of them in there. Not quite so much as the standard 88 key keyboard, but more than enough to be excruciatingly painful.
Make no mistake, I started this process almost a month ago, The first day, I got the first octave, from middle C, in tune with itself. The second day, I retuned the first octave (slightly flat, but not terrible), and moved to the next upper octave. The third day, well, I threw caution to the wind and (re)tuned all the way to the top of the keyboard.
The interesting thing, to me anyway, was that the farther I got away from middle C, the more out of tune things got. I would have assumed - and I'd love for someone to educate me on this - that the lighter the strings got, the less tension they would produce, and the more in tune they would actually be. Not so, at least on this piano.
The one thing that did not surprise me was that, the higher in pitch I got - the harder it was to tell whether it was actually in tune or whether I could just not differentiate the tones at that high a pitch as I could at the lower ones. I'm assuming that this is where the true master piano tuners are differentiated from the novices.
I was pleased to find out that, after I had tuned the upper half of the piano to itself (that would be middle C is really middle G) and then went away for a long weekend (to San Francisco, but that's another story) it was still essentially in tune with itself when I got back.
That's when I started on the lower octaves. Interestingly, to me anyway, the lower octaves were far less out of tune with the piano (G) than the upper octaves. Given the size of the strings and the general tension, I would have originally bet that these strings would have been WAY worse than the upper strings.
But, as with the upper strings, the lower I went, the harder it became to differentiate between the tones by ear. And, of course, at both ends of the scale, the chromatic tunic became more or more useless the farther you went.
So, I'm going to have to develop an upper/lower ear to do this. I know that - at some point - the chromatic tuner will help me at the middle C range and then I'm on my own, tuning each octave to the last. I've already experienced that at each end of the range, and I have to say it's interesting to have to rely on my ear and vibrations rather than technology. I'm not sure I've done that since my late teens...
At this point in time, I have the entire piano tuned, more or less, so that middle C is really middle G and everything else is more or less (I'm still learning) in tune with that.
And THAT means I can now walk by the piano, hit a C chord (really G - but if it sounds in tune, I don't really care) or whatever strikes my fancy, and it does not make me cringe, cry, or want to just blow torch the whole thing.
And that, in the final analysis, has got to be worth something - even if it doesn't last forever. That remains to be seen... At this point. I'm encouraged.
No comments:
Post a Comment