Nigel Donovan
On Piano Tuners
Traditionally, the piano tuner enters through the front door, never the tradesman’s entrance as he is escorted straight to the drawing room.
He (or she!) is almost unique in being able to say almost exactly when he is going to call – unlike the plumber, washing machine man, telephone repair man, etc., who will give you a day or, if you’re lucky, a morning or afternoon when he is likely to call. A common complaint is that even then, having taken the day off work, he doesn’t come at all! Value your piano tuner who is apologetic if he’s twenty minutes late! In fact, when piano tuners get together it isn’t long before the subject gets around to who has been stood up recently – it happens more often than you’d think, that upon arrival at the client’s house at the agreed time, the poor tuner finds his knocks on the front door unanswered. He will even go to the back door, shout through the letter box but alas! There is no one in.
Mobile phones are really useful aren’t they? My favourite use is to phone the customer when I’ve been standing on the doorstep desperately willing her to answer the door, not believing that she isn’t in. Usually, she is in the garden and comes to answer the phone to find the piano tuner on her doorstep!
Having gained access to the piano and made comfortable (tea please, white, no sugar) what a thrill of anticipation in taking off the casework and discovering what needs to be done! Explaining pitch to someone who doesn’t know what semitones or octaves are can be difficult but is usually overcome by asking what the piano is used for – if for accompanying another instrument then A440 (concert pitch) is what is required even if it does cost a little more. If the piano is used solely on its own, it is still better to be at A440 because at that pitch the string tensions are at their optimum, where they were designed to be.
Unless it’s only a fraction flat (less than two hertz, say A438), a pitch raise will usually involve two tunings, a rough and fine, completed in one session for less than the call out charge of the average plumber. Bear in mind that a PTA qualified tuner will have trained for probably three years and then have been practising for a further two years before subjecting himself to a gruelling test to bear the letters MPTA (Member of the Pianoforte Tuners’ Association) after his name. Patience is a virtue seldom lacking in the piano tuner, his only vice being a chocolate biscuit with that cup of tea.
What of the blind piano tuner? Is it not true that his hearing is far superior to compensate for his lack of sight? It must be said that there are some first class visually impaired tuners, some average ones and some who just about get by; pretty much the same as for sighted tuners. The truth is that tuning pianos has very little to do with hearing and everything to do with listening. Those three years of training open up the tuner’s ear to enable him to listen to the beats (a pulsing sound heard when two strings are played together) and develop fine motor control between the hand, ear and brain. Joining this trio is the mind’s eye which somehow bores into the wrest (tuning) pin, gauging its position deep within the wrestplank.
The tuner will demonstrate his satisfaction on completion by playing his favourite sequence of chords - not necessarily to check the accuracy of the tuning, that will have been those octave runs you just heard, but more to assess the quality of tone and the suitability of the tuning on that particular piano. No two tunings are ever exactly the same; the art of the tuner is in drawing out the best tuning each piano is capable of producing. This is not the same tuning that your neighbour has and definitely not the same tuning an electronic guitar tuner would impose upon your piano.
When will you see the piano tuner again? If it’s several years, the tuning will have slipped back to such a degree that it needs a pitch raise to pull it back from the brink of disharmony and you might never hear the true potential of your piano. If, however, it is six months then the fine tuning gets finer and more stable, eventually reaching the point where the tuner can walk away with the satisfaction of knowing that he has achieved something close to perfection.
