Touching up out-of-tune unisons - to which frequency to tune?

Mikael

Amateur pianist here, no tuning experience, recently bought my first acoustic piano. May I ask a newbie question about Pianoscope use?

After a professional tuning several weeks ago by a piano tuner I created a snapshot of that tuning (for any later comparisons) by recording a static tuning using Pianoscope Pro.

Probably due to severe and prolonged heat wave here in Europe several notes now developed honky-tonk out-of-tune unisons.

I was planning to schedule the next visit of the piano tuner in the fall (start of the heating season), i.e. in the next 3-4 months from now. At that time I wanted to ask him to teach me how to deal with such unisons between his visits.

In the meantime I am contemplating touching up the offensive unisons myself, with the help of Pianoscope. I am not perceiving the piano to be significantly out of tune overall, therefore I was thinking to limit my amateur newbie ‚intervention‘ to the minimum, i.e. only to about 5 most disturbing honky-tonk unisons.

If i only want to be focusing on five notes, to which tuning curve/frequency should I be tuning the 3 individual strings in a unison? Can I pull up the static tuning record from before the weather change and only recreate these 5 notes in isolation and ignore the rest?

Or is recreating from the static tuning curve a matter of all-or-none, that is, am I supposed to be recreating all 88 of them from the snapshot, since probably all of them now deviate somewhat from that snapshot?

I hope I am not overthinking and would be sincerely grateful for any practical tips how to deal with such unisons!

MilanDka

If you are asking these kinds of questions, you'd better not get into it. I assume you don't even have the proper equipment. If you tune only those 3–5 out-of-tune notes—even using a static tuning profile—they might be fine individually (unisons), but they won't fit 100% with the rest of the instrument. Furthermore, experience shows that when a customer says only a few notes are out of tune, the entire instrument is completely out of tune. A technician views tuning in a completely different way.
The result is therefore this: retune the entire instrument from scratch, either by using a recorded static tuning profile or by creating a new file. You can't go wrong with an average curve or pure octaves (my preference, which I then further adjust myself).

Jacob L

Hi Mikael, The problem with using the captured static tuning curve is that the whole piano will have shifted since it was tuned. The ETD is not going to help you in this situation. If you want to touch up some offensive unisons, it's better to do it aurally.

A good approach would be this: mute off all but one string of the note you're fixing. Then play that single string note together with the perfect fifth, fourth and octave above and/or below. Do this with each of the strings of that unison, and decide which one sounds best with the test intervals. Then tune the other strings to that string.

You may notice as you go that it tends to be a certain string (left/middle/right) of each note that is your best reference.

Keep in mind that there is a lot of technique involved in how to actually set the string & pin so that the pitch is stable and stays where you put it. But you shouldn't do any harm if you're careful. Watch some basic tuning lever technique videos on YouTube.