Digital Tuning Devices and Apps, are they any good?

Apologies for being so long in posting, its been a very busy year in the workshop with a full rebuild on a Steinway including making missing parts no longer available, then a Bluthner grand which had several issues along with tuning for festivals and stadium concerts, some challenging repairs and tuning overseas.

Tuning overseas has been the inspiration for this blog.

Increasingly I am seeing posts on social media of tuners using apps.

When visiting pianos I sold or had arranged to be moved overseas I end up doing more tunings in the area mainly for the customers friends who are impressed by my work as their local tuner used an app and "did not do a very good job".

You may rightly wonder why this is worthy of a blog, and thats very fair.

Tuning a piano is a great skill which takes years to master. In victorian times ONLY two professional people were permitted the honour of entering the front door of a home, your doctor (or medical professional) and your piano tuner, all other trades went through the back tradesman's entrance. Something I pointed out to a very rude lady twenty years ago who opened the front door to her home (mansion) and said "good you are here, go round the back as all tradesman are to use the proper tradesman's entrance as per tradition with the period of my home, be quick its that way" this was said with a very patronising and rude attitude, best not to say that to a piano historian. I was as polite as possible "you are correct when this house was built all trades went to the tradesman entrance, but being a doctor and piano tuner was a highly regarded position and we were the only professionals to enter the front door, you have lovely carpets so I will remove my shoes here, or do you have covers as the stately homes where I work and enter the front door?".... her piano was below par for such a home!

Back to tuning!

Every piano is different as is every room each unique piano is placed in. You can have two identical pianos that left the factory on the same day, one placed in a large hall, the other in a small well furnished room in a house, sue to these rooms both pianos will get tuned completely differently to get them sounding right.

Why? annoyingly simple answer its due to the different acoustics of each room, and how each piano performs to these different acoustics, an app will not pick this up, its checking the pitch and nothing else. Both pianos will sound better but they will also sound off.

The other thing an app will not pick up on are whats called "false beats". Beats are created at the points when strings at different pitches no matter how small , even on the same pitch but a fraction out are meeting at the same point in the sound waves. These are what we are working with when tuning and again acoustics factor into how clear these are.

False beats (harmonics) are created on one wire when its damage so it acts as if it were two wires creating a beat within the wire, either by corrosion eating into the wire, surface dirt, a kink when being fitted or when twisted during fitting. A damaged bridge can also cause false beats. Apps and devices tend to read these are being a pure beat (or harmonic) so tell you the note is out of tune.

Older pianos also have a duller sound which apps will struggle with due to the impure sound always having a dull and short sound. An app will struggle with poor string scaling and iron strings found in older and cheap pianos not tempered steel, poor sting scaling will also making using an app harder. The app WILL aid the tuning but the end result will sound out of tune.

The last thing that the apps etc fail to detect is that the bars on the metal frame cause interference to the notes either side of these bars.

The amount of recent tunings I been called to do after a tuner has used a device or app has been shocking and the pianos have taken up to 3 hours to tune instead of around an hour. Thankfully the clients have always been pleased with my work, but each took several tunings to get stabilised.

HOWEVER there are some very good and well known electronic tuners and trained qualified tuners use them purely as an aid or as a backup. These tuners are using a mixture of their trained ear and then the device purely as an aid, especially for difficult pianos hard acoustics or troublesome note.

The way to spot a genuine trained tuner using a device/app is they will tune the centre of the piano first using a sequence of intervals then they will either go up the treble using octaves and an interval to check and or double octaves, then they will do the same either the bass or trebles. A non trained tuner will start at the bottom working to the treble playing one note at a time, as soon as you see this it's time to politely stop them!

Why does this matter?

When we tune your piano we are adjusting the overall tension on the frame and often we are stretching the wire adding tension, or we are reducing the tension on the wire. In doing this we are ever so lightly twisting the metal frame as we do so, hence a piano thats not been tuned for a while we ended up redoing notes as we do our checks, then we may advice retuning in a few months to stabalise the piano. So by starting in the middle initially setting up the tempered scale then working out either side minimises this twisting on the frame, therefore giving a far more stable piano tuning.

"App tuners" (as I have heared them being reffered to) are not fully trained and do not "bed" the pins properly neither do they know how to feel when a pin is twisting or turning so do not know how to reset the pin ensuring the string is fully set. This comes with serious training under a true master and then with years of experience, the difference is minimal and takes time to mater the feel of the pins.

The big companies Steinway, Bluthner, Bosendorfer, Bechstein and main piano dealers and restorers such Coach House Pianos, 1066, Sheargolds, Jacque Samuel's, Piano Restorations LTD and reputable smaller firms and movers like Pianovan, Plaza Pianos etc all insist on using aural tuners. Some companies if you use a non trained tuner this will invalidate the warranty of the piano. BUT if you use a reputable trained tuner who uses an app or device as an assistant they are satisfied with this, though aural tuning is always preferred.

Personally I only use an app for the first tuning after fully re-stringing and then as a tuning fork as I can show the owner where there piano is regarding pitch.

So if you book a piano tuner and they set up an app pay attention. if they start in the middle and play two notes for the entire tuning and play different notes to check the note they just tuned or carry on using octaves your piano is in good hands. If they only play one note at a time, they are not a trained tuner!