Tuning Unisons, part 1

My first pandemic purchase was a basic piano tuning kit: student-grade hammer, strip mute, six rubber mutes. I had neglected to have my Steinway tuned for more than two years. Shameful. Shameless! I had excuses: no money, no time, my piano tuner moved, the dog ate my phone book… And so the Chocolate Box, as my friend Sakura calls my piano, languished. 

My three roommates decamped to their family homes: the Chocolate Box was my quarantine pod. I had to make amends… so I googled. Forums, e-books, instructional sites cautioned: without a teacher, I could render my piano unplayable! An improper technique will wreak havoc on the Hexagrip© pinblock! And I would be reviled, castigated, verbally flayed by any tuner who might deign to come, perhaps long after a vaccine was developed, to repair my damage!

You have already guessed: I dove right in. I cleaned up a few unisons, then tackled a total tuning. Equal temperament is a tricky subject, but I’m a smart kid! I have read one book on the subject! I have two excellent ears! I made a mess. In the end, the pinblock suffered no damage, but the piano sounded atrocious. I was careful “not to bend the pin,” as the Internet advised, and I listened for “slow-rolling fourths and fifths,” but I confess, I made it worse. The Goldbergs aria—G Major—sounded lovely! But the G-sharp minor Rachmaninov prelude? Sour, astringent; simply disgusting. 

“The problem,” I hear Wendell Berry admonishing, “was a familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge.” I had some tools, but I didn’t have a clue. 

I sought out expert advice. Mark Cerisano’s website is the most complete and most cogently argued source I found. Perhaps he is so thorough and precise because his method is nontraditional, and therefore, controversial. (It seems the forum people were ready to dog-pile him long before understanding what he was up to.) Mark’s degrees are in engineering and music education; he knows exactly what’s happening inside that magic box, and how to convey it to a novice like me. My first Skype lesson: educational triage. I knew nothing! Forget the temperament, my “clean” unisons were anything but. 

Let’s talk unisons: three strings of a piano key are tuned to the same pitch. If they are exactly in tune, the sound will be pure, clean, and shallow. If they are out of tune, the sound will be noisy, unfocused, and “honky-tonk.” Interestingly, if the unisons are out of tune by a very small amount, for example, Mark’s favorite unison of his ten-sample experiment (no. 10, the “cascading sustain” unison, out of tune by .47 cents) the piano comes alive! Yes, our unisons must be clean, but not TOO clean. 

Dear reader, I would have been happy to achieve any unison that wasn’t honky-tonk. Tuning a unison is not a simple matter: any number of shifting variables undermine your success. Uncertainty creeps in at every level, such as

The string: when you begin to turn the pin, the pitch often won’t change immediately. You wonder if you’ve got the correct pin—and you are often right to wonder. If you did choose correctly, the pitch will only change once the tension imbalance on the two sides of the agraffe (that little gate thingy that separates the speaking from the non-speaking portions of the string) overcomes the friction of the agraffe itself. Once it does, the pitch changes, but you may be left with another tension imbalance, because of the behavior of 

The pin: yes, it is a hard metal, but even so, it twists and bends under the force of the hammer. (Even when you are “careful not to bend the pin.”) When the force of the hammer is removed, the pin unbends and untwists, changing the tension of the non-speaking portion of the string. Over time, and with use, this tension imbalance will return to equilibrium—changing the pitch. Unfortunately, I was using a nonprofessional 

Tuning hammer: it turns out it’s very difficult to buy a professional hammer as a layperson. One does not simply place an order at Schaff, one must be recommended by a trusted insider. Any hammer bends a bit under pressure, but my student model was downright floppy. Add this flop to the uncertainty of the string’s equilibrium and the shenanigans of the pin, and you have an impossible task. Suddenly I wished I had tipped every tuner in my past some astronomical amount—I hadn’t realized it was witchcraft! 

Mark often talks about letting the piano tell you what it needs. Listening deeply—yes, the first step towards making amends. The Chocolate Box and I are back on speaking terms, but I have penance yet to pay…