pitch raising

[Billbrpt@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 1/10/00 7:14:57 PM Pacific Standard Time, 
bholden@wave.co.nz (Brian Holden) writes:

<< Any piano if at all possible should be tuned to concert pitch (snip)>>

Thanks for posting your essay on pitch raising, Brian.  It was very good 
writing and very thorough in its treatment.  It is good enough to be 
published in the Journal, you might try submitting it.

I agree most of all with your idea of not completely (and thus too severely 
raising the pitch so that you really are tuning 33% higher than the piano is 
flat).  If this were a hard and fast rule, sometimes the tuner would be 
tuning as much as 1/2 step sharp and that is neither necessary, nor would the 
string settle back that far and it would be much more at risk to break a 
string.  When a piano is beyond 50 cents flat, it is better just to bring 
each string up to standard pitch first, then on the second pass, do the pitch 
raise calculation then.  The 3rd pass should be a breeze.

The way I remember George Defebaugh describe pitch raise was very much to the 
point and succinct.  Tune the initial pitch slightly sharp (1 beat sharp for 
every 3 beats flat).  Tune all the way up in octaves.  (Jim Coleman showed 
how he tuned up in whole steps and also demonstrated a hammer technique which 
I have used ever since.  I still like and use Jim's style of whole step 
tuning.  It is far less stressful and it does lay on the new tension more 
evenly [whether that does any good or not, I don't know]).  

Leave beats between your octaves as you tune.  The more the pitch change, the 
more beats.  One good way is to have the whole piano strip muted, do this 
very quickly and roughly to the middle strings only, then repeat the 
procedure, tightening up your tolerances a bit but still leaving beats in the 
octaves.  The key to getting the pitch raise done in under 30 minutes is to 
keep moving.  You don't have to get it perfect yet, you don't even want to.

This will leave your piano in a state where a fine tuning with good stability 
can be on the piano.  If it is more than 20 cents flat or even less in a 
concert tuning situation, it is nearly impossible to arrive at a stable 
tuning even with two passes.  You will inevitably find strings that did not 
render well.  If you give them a good, hard test blow, they will sink down 
sometimes as low or lower than where you first started.  This is especially 
true of the high treble.

You have the choice of getting it stable now or later.  Yes, there are times 
when I will "hot dog" a 30 cent low piano up to pitch in only two passes 
because of whatever circumstances there may be but I would only be deceiving 
myself if I thought that it was a really good, fine tuning.  It would not be 
but then again, it may well be good enough for the circumstances, all of 
which have been covered on the List.

I think of pitch raises as golfers do a course.  A par one, two or three and 
possibly even more.  A hole in one is a rare event.  A concert tuning is 
almost always at least a par three.  When I prepared the piano for the 
Temperament Festival in Providence, I tuned the piano so many times over the 
week, I really couldn't say how many it was but I still never did get it 
absolutely perfect.  I would certainly never have tried to present it with 
just one pass.

Now that I use an SAT with custom made programs to tune most of my pianos, I 
have found something that works well for those pianos that are increasingly 
flat as you go higher up the scale.  Those notes are flatter than your 
starting note and they are to be tuned correctly, they must be tuned 33% 
higher than the actual program which can easily be in the 20-30 cent range in 
the high treble and as much as 50-75 cents for the last few notes in certain 
circumstances.  To get these to hold, you really have to push the pitch.

Starting in my low tenor with a selected offset (or even none), I add 2 cents 
at every F and every C.  If things are really flat by the time I get to F6 I 
add 4 cents there and to C7 and to F7.  Sometimes I have made bigger leaps 
sooner and even bigger later.  But I think 50 cents offset ought to be the 
absolute high limit that one would put in the program.  Many, many times I 
have tuned the 7th octave 20 to 30 cents sharp of standard and still found it 
way too flat on the next pass.  Sometimes, repeating only a small section of 
the piano that was miscalculated is necessary.

Pitch changes are a regular part of regular piano service.  They should be 
seen as a way to make the piano better and to earn more money.

Bill Bremmer RPT
Madison, Wisconsin