Sometimes piano owners feel it may be worthwhile to learn the piano tuning skill and tend to their instruments on their own. They may even purchase a piano tuning kit and embark on their tuning journey. While you may be able to easily purchase the necessary piano tuning tools and watch a few tutorials online, we do not recommend going this route on a whim. Your instrument is a complex and precise work of art, where over 12,000 parts work in concert to produce a beautiful sound. There is a reason pianos cost so much, and that’s because it takes intricate and meticulous work to create a good quality instrument.
So before you go meddling with the strings and pins of your masterpiece, think carefully about possible repercussions. Namely that you may cause more damage than benefit, leading to expensive repairs down the road. Having issued this warning, let’s take a brief look at what makes up a technician’s piano tuning kit.
Piano Tuning Kits:
Piano tuning or maintaining kits consist of all the tools and materials you can use at home by yourself for the tuning of your piano without hiring a professional piano tuner and making it clean crystal and new.
3 Important Tools in Piano Tuning Kits:
1. Piano Tuning Hammer
Piano Tuning Hammer (also known as Piano Tuning Lever or Piano Tuning Key) is the main tool in a technician’s piano tuning kit. Once you open up your instrument (whether an upright or a grand piano, you will have to open the lid in order to get to the tuning pins), you will use the hammer to tune each note. The hammer is applied to the tuning pins in order to turn them and either tighten or loosen the strings that are attached to them. Seems simple enough, but be aware that improper technique can result in broken strings or even damage to the wooden structure.
2. Tuning Fork
Tuning Fork is an old, but reliable tool for piano tuning, and in fact, tuning any stringed instrument. Historically, tuning forks have been designed to vibrate at a standard 440Hz, also known as Concert A. Meaning that the sound of the vibrating fork is a reference for the sound of an A note on your piano. Once A is in tune, the rest of the notes are just aligned to be in sync with it. Tuning to a standard pitch of A440 is important to ensure your piano not only sounds right to you but can if necessary play in an ensemble with other instruments, so long as all of them are tuned to the same standard.
3. Electronic Tuner
Electronic Tuner has recently replaced the time-tested tuning fork as a more convenient and easier-to-use companion in a technician’s piano tuning kit. There are even apps available on your phone that will play the standard A440 sound for you and assist you just as well as a fork might. The danger and downfall of using an electronic tuner is that many amateur and even some professional technicians will allow the software to do their job for them in its entirety.
Because electronic tuners will not only play Concert A, but the sounds of every note on a piano, all you have to do is tune each note to match the sound played. The problem with this approach is that pianos are notoriously temperamental instruments, each one unique in its construction. With over 12,000 moving parts and differences in wood, brand, model, design and age, no two pianos sound exactly alike.
Also check, Piano Repair Services
The other materials that are not specifically included in your local tuning kits but advanced kits are offering some new electronic-based materials to maintain pitch correction on your piano without detecting it by yourself and materials related to strings which can help you maintain them and reduce the chances of any sort of malfunctioning so you can enjoy playing your piano without any accident or disturbance.
Final Words
So tuning your instrument to a premade list of sounds will be akin to getting a standard gown or tuxedo without any alterations for your specific needs. While it may work for some, it won’t work for most. Your instrument will certainly sound better, but something will be off and you won’t quite know what it is. Our technicians will never use an electronic tuner except to get the standard Concert A sound. Starting with A440 they tune each instrument organically, taking into account its unique construction and makeup to produce unparalleled clarity of sound that will fit your instrument just right.
