Hammer Technique

When thought is given to hammer technique, consideration must also be given to the various elements that taken separately, may not appear to be so very important; but a chain is made of many links and we all know the weakest one.

The tuning hammer, at first glance seems to be just a tuning hammer - but there are a variety available. The first consideration is its length. The average hammer is 10 to 11 inches long without a head. I have seen hammers as short as 6 inches and as long as 15 inches. The short hammer feeds back information more directly from the pin and has less length for flexing, but requires considerable strength and endurance to operate. The longer hammers provide more leverage but tend to flex, causing poor hand-to-pin communication, and the increased weight bends the tuning pin a little more than desired.

There have been several variations on the standard “professional” tuning hammer - the very heavy hammer turned from a piece of drive shafting which gives considerable weight to the matter, and the impact tuning hammer which has gained favour with some for pitch-raising. (These are experimental or special application tools and do not, on the average, apply for fine tuning.)

Having an extension hammer is not entirely necessary for extending t introduces so much flex that all mechanical advantage is voided through lost communication. Extension hammers tend to flex at the tightening ferrule and the shaft turns in the handle. The only advantage they have is that the handle can be removed for stringing or other special applications. The ideal hammer, then, is one that is about 10 inches long, lightweight, rigid, one-piece construction, and made of nice wood if possible.

I should be talking - the disreputable hammer I use is only 7-l/2inches long, but is extended to 11inches overall for tuning...

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On Pitch Raising

Pitch-raising of the last few years has been turned into a bit of a circus. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as there has been much good accomplished in the way of technique, world records, and written words about the subject. What seems to have been neglected is the fact that, for so many of us that go out there day after day to make a living, pitch-raising is no game but a function of our activities that saps our energy and stresses our minds and bodies.

Occasionally, I am tightly scheduled for two or three weeks at a time. When I encounter a piano that is flat, and that I know will not stay in tune and on pitch with only one tuning, I have to work harder to do the two tunings during the same time I had hoped to do but one. What this means is that I have to decide what the fall rate of this instrument will be and raise the pitch to compensate. I must tune the piano well enough so that, when I go through it for the second time, it will require less energy than in a regular tuning, will stay where I want it, and will leave me feeling confident that it reflects the skill I brought to bear.

I schedule four tunings a day: one at 9:30 am (to avoid the rush hour), the second at 11:30 am, the third at 1:30 pm, and the final tuning at 3:30 pm. I allow 90 minutes to go in and do the work required, and then 30 minutes to move on to the next job. If I am unable to do the work necessary during that amount of time, I decide what work can be done and what work can be postponed to another time. I have never deferred a pitch-raise, although on some doubtful pianos I have not raised the pitch at all.

I generally take 20 to 30 minutes to raise pitch and then another 45 to 50 minutes to fine tune. The pitch-raise time may seem excessive to some, but my objective is to finish with a piano in tune that requires a fine polish only for the second tuning - without more rough cutting.

At one time I was tuning so many pianos of one make and model that I was able to pitch-raise them up to ... 

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Lubrication of Piano Parts

When pianos are built, the builders concern themselves with lubrication of moving parts in a rather fundamental way. They are concerned with new material assembled under controlled atmospheric conditions and lubrication is a very minor consideration in construction process. Obvious friction points such as those in the trap work are greased or graphited. In that complicated mechanism called the action, many friction points are treated with a permanent lubrication such as burnished graphite or were designed to be self-lubricating through use of felt against metal or, more recently, teflon against metal.

When the pianos are completed and shipped, further thought is not given to lubrication since factory people generally have no other contact with the instruments. Once the pianos are sold, however, a whole new set of problems begins to develop, including wear and tear, atmospheric extremes, abuse, and neglect. Lubrication is also one of these problems.

The word “lubricate” comes from Latin lubricare, which means “to make slippery.” The trick with piano friction points is to make them slippery and keep them slippery for extended periods of time. A lack of lubrication creates two general problems - sluggish response of moving parts and noise in the form of squeaks.

The anatomy of the piano creates other problems. There are no reservoirs to store lubrication such as oil pans or grease cups. Instead, the lubricants often must function between dissimilar materials, usually as thin films while exposed to accumulating dust and dirt. They must hold well through periods of use, must break down during disuse, and must not react with the host materials by creating any chemical change.

With the above criteria in mind, let examine the materials used as piano part lubricants. They fall into two general categories: (1) Solids and powdered solids include soapstone, talc, graphite, and teflon. (2) Liquids include tallow, grease of various kinds, and liquids that utilize some of the powders in suspension. The list of liquids must be expanded to include the sprays available today that have proven to be useful and time saving.

Many years ago one of the standard lubricants for piano parts was mutton tallow into which was stirred a fair amount of talc or baby powder. With the demise of the neighbourhood butcher shop, mutton tallow has been difficult to acquire. However, if you know a butcher who can get you some mutton fat, you can make a life-time supply of mutton tallow lubricant very inexpensively. Simply put the raw fat in a frying pan and fry it at low heat until it turns to a liquid. Skim or strain the liquid so as to separate it from any fiber residue and allow it to cool. The tallow will be a white waxlike grease. An additional reheating and skimming will improve the quality by leaving behind any missed residue or poor-quality fat. Into this refined tallow stir as much Johnson’s baby powder as it will hold without losing its consistency as a grease.

A contemporary substitute for mutton tallow and talc is... 

 

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Tuning By Plucking

One useful technique I forgot to mention in last month’s blog post on treble tuning is plucking. If you are having difficulty hearing a unison or even an octave in the high treble, then pluck the strings and listen to the relative pitch.

This approach, in combination with the key, may help clear things up a bit. (If you have not read my last post, I suggest you do so to maintain continuity with this one.) Every note must be tested until you know that it is right, or as right as possible, before going on to the next string. This applies to every aspect of tuning, temperament, treble, and bass, and cannot be overly stressed here. After completing the temperament, I start tuning the bass by tuning E3 so its fifth (B3) is as pure as possible without an overly rough fourth (A3), and so the third (G#3) and sixth (C#o) retrogress evenly relative to their adjacent intervals.

I have found the third/tenth test useful, but none of the above are as important as the sound of the octave itself. 

The one thing that does come out rather rapidly is an error in the temperament. One obvious error is the slanted temperament. This is my term for the temperament where everything appears to work out well but the thirds progress too slowly or too rapidly - as shown by roller-coastering of the retrogressive thirds. If the roller-coastering is minor it can be ignored (but remembered for correction at the next tuning). If the error is excessive, then the temperament must be retuned. If the first few thirds going into the bass are too fast, the temperament slope is ... 

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Key-Weighting and Tuning

My customer and piano teacher Jennifer C. from London Kensington asks:

How can I improve the tuning with key-weighting on my Yamaha C3?

Answer:

Dear Jennifer,

This blog post is intended to suggest a possibly lesser known “aid” for tuning the entire piano. Not included in this discussion are such basics as temperament, tuning checks to use, methods of tuning and electronic instruments if one is used. This article will focus on “fine tuning” a piano that is already at the A440 pitch level and in fairly good, even tensions in all sections. While tuning certain pianos, particularly the older uprights, all of us have encountered certain strings, usually the longer tenor ones, that suddenly start to ring or sound while tuning due to sympathetic vibration. It was exactly this situation that prompted further study and the exploration of these “open” strings as an aid in aural tuning. It was further noted that the more in phase the octave being tuned, the louder and clearer the sing-through sound created by sympathetic vibration. 

This blog post assumes that the reader also understands at least some of the physical characteristics of vibrating piano strings, their modes, partials and inharmonicities. The principal of weighting keys is to deliberately raise the damper, freeing the string to sound sympathetically as related intervals are being tuned. The louder and clearer the sound of the weighted-open note, the better in tune the interval being tuned. This is the main principle of the system. Primary intervals used in key-weight tuning are the octave, fifth, octave fifth and the double octave fifth. We hope to stimulate enough reader interest for many to actually experiment with the use of key-weighted open sounding strings in tuning. 

One very discriminate college piano teacher once remarked, “I am more interested in the fifth being in tune than the simple octave.” Of course, what she was favouring was...

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Advice for a Tuning Setback

My friend Peter W. from London, Ealing who is a novice piano tuner asks me:

In the last few months, I have been having a setback in my tunings. I am experiencing a problem which is adding an extra hour onto my one hour and 45 minute tuning time. 

I am assuming I am doing something wrong. I set the temperament first then usually do the bass next, but because of this problem I go first to the tenor and treble, and sometimes do a pitch raise in the high treble section (after the last break). By the time I complete the bass section, my area above the temperament is flat and occasionally my temperament is out. 

My experience is different with each piano, but as always the treble section after the last break is always flat. This is always a problem when the pitch is 5 cents flat or lo-20 cents flat. Any piano which is over 20 cents flat I do a pitch raise and then a fine tune and I still encounter this problem. I always set the pins and pound out the keys to settle the strings. 

Can you tell me what I may be doing wrong?

Read the answer at my website:

https://www.professionalpianotunerlondon.co.uk/post/advice-for-a-tuning-setback

Piano Tuning Problems in the Upper Register

My customer Kathy M. from London, Fulham asks me: 

"Can you explain more about this tuning on the treble section? It doesn't really help the sound quality! If so, can you solve the problem?"

Read the answer at my website:

https://www.professionalpianotunerlondon.co.uk/post/piano-tuning-problems-in-the-upper-register