continuous piano tuning

navindra

I'm trying to figure out an optimal daily piano tuning schedule so that my piano is in a reasonable steady state with minimal effort.

Assuming I start out with a piano with all notes within +/- 1 cent of target and assume I have the appetite for tuning about 8 notes a day.

If notes are within +/- 1 cent I would do nothing.

Otherwise, every day I would pick 4 of the most deviant notes in the mid register, 2 of the most deviant notes in the treble register, 2 of the most deviant notes in the bass register, and tune them within < 0.5 cents sharp.

After a week, I would have tuned 56 notes, and after 11 days, I would have tuned 88 notes. Some of the notes may get repeat tunings and some notes may not get tuned at all.

Maybe another approach would be better -- can pianoscope help devise an optimal continuous tuning strategy?

Stefan Borowicz

I'm not sure if there's anything specific in Pianoscope that would address that, other than taking an inharmonicity reading of your piano and saving the file to reuse each time you tune.
Perhaps I'm not understanding your goal, but if I am, the problem with the logic is that the piano is a moving target, and stretching out the amount of time that you're tuning just prolongs the process indefinitely. As an analogy, think of it as lacing up a pair of shoes and selectively pulling on a lace at one eyelet only, then wearing the shoes for the day...the movement in wearing the shoes will alter the tension around the other eyelets to find equilibrium. The same is happening in the piano. That's why pitch raises are done quickly to change the tension in the instrument wholesale before attempting an fine tuning. I hope that makes some sense...

Frank Illenberger

I second what Stefan says. But if the pitch changes of your instrument are small, your approach could work. The problem would then be to detect which notes are off the most. To do this with the current version of pianoscope, you could start a pitch-raise measurement of all notes and this will show you graphically how much off the notes are from the desired tuning-curve. You could then pick the 4 most deviant notes. If you do this daily, this could work. If the pitch changes are too large, you will run into side-effects with other notes that Stefan mentioned.

navindra

Thanks to you both!

Great suggestion on the pitch raise measurement. I'm thinking this existing function in pianoscope could also help.

I would have to measure the optimal concert pitch and then identify the most deviant notes using pitch raise.

At some point, the concert pitch may have deviated too much and I'd have to retune everything.

navindra

Assuming I tuned a set X of notes against A440 and then take a break (up to 24 hours) and come back to tuning the rest of the piano.

Is there a way to measure the current concert pitch relative to the notes that I tuned already? That way I can continue tuning other notes on the piano relative to the ones I already tuned, taking drift into consideration.

Frank Illenberger

navindra Yes, there are two ways to adjust the concert pitch to thermal drift:

Option 1:

From the main menu in the tuning view, go to Instrument > Concert Pitch,
In the upcoming panel choose Measure and play A4 on the instrument. This will adjust the tuning curve to use the current concert pitch.
If you have added the concert pitch as a header field in the tuning view, you can simply tap on it to open the panel.

Option 2:

If you have activated the freeze indicator, you can play any note. When you then tap and hold the grey freeze indicator line, an alert appears which offers you to adjust the concert pitch for the tuning curve in a way so that the frozen pitch of the note will land on the zero line.

navindra

Wow! Just wow.

I didn't know about the last tip in Option 1, nor did I know about Option 2 at all. This is a truly delightful app experience.

Do you think there's value in determining the concert pitch over a specific set of notes (which may all have drifted slightly differently) as opposed to from a single note?

Either way, thanks for this, I'll play around with the existing options as I already think they'll be helpful.

Frank Illenberger

navindra I am glad that you like it. If you want to average multiple notes, you can use the Optimize function in the menu of the concert pitch panel and measure as many notes as you desire. pianoscope derives an optimal concert pitch from the measured values.

navindra

Frank Illenberger doesn't this method require that I measure the indicated notes first? Is there an option to ignore those and only measure the notes I want?

Frank Illenberger

navindra You are right. Currently, the optimization requires you to at least measure one point per octave. I could remove this requirement in an update to support this workflow.

navindra

Frank Illenberger Thank you!!