stretch tuning question

I'm trying to learn piano tuning on my own. I live in a remote area and there are no qualified tuners to ask. My question is this:

If I stretch a piano tuning, especially on a spinet, wouldn't the piano be grossly out of tune with other instruments. It seems a no win situation. If it is tune with itself (ie stretching) it's out of tune with other instruments. If it's in tune with other instruments then it will sound awful because of the inharmonicity of the strings. Either way

there's a potential for it to be wrong. What do you tell a customer? Do you tune the piano after asking the customer if the piano is going to be

mostly solo or mostly with other instruments? What do you do if the customer says both? What do you do if the piano is to be used in a concert at an orchestra and the maestro is a perfectionist? It seems both can't be correct? What am I missing?

If you are serious about learning to be a professional tuner JOIN your local guild and take a prescribed course and get qualified. You will need an piano to practice on.

There are many good web sites that talk about temper as I am reading up on this myself just for fun, but if you are serious about a career - join the guild and get formal training.

You are correct that there is a basic contradiction that can never be resolved in some cases.

But proper stretching will not make a piano sound grossly out of tune with other instruments, by the ears of the vast majority of people. It will put it slightly to somewhat out of tune, in a mostly pleasant way. In fact, most fixed pitch instruments are not precisely in tune with one another through their range. But when they are well tuned, the slight discrepancies they create give a nice warm feeling. Also, in a good musical arrangement, the ranges of the different instruments may not overlap much.

Often, synthesized instruments sound thin and sterile when played in a musical arrangement, simply because the synthesist doesn't know how to slightly detune the different instrument patches for a more natural sound. The world of real musical instrument tuning is far from perfect.

However, when it comes to pianos with very compromised scales (like spinets, even small grands) it's best to consider the use it will get. If it is going to play professionally in combo with a fretted bass (and recorded) for instance, it may be best to sacrifice the stretch in favor of being more in tune with the bass guitar, if there is any overlap of the notes played by each. But really, playing 'professionally' with a spinet piano is kind of a contradiction in terms. They are not professional instruments.

Also, the people who own spinet pianos are rarely the kind of people with a good ear for tuning anyway. Most spinets are The Family Piano that may get pecked at once in a while (or not) and never seriously critiqued. Stretched or not stretched means nothing to them. They mostly hear grossly bad unisons and octaves, not degrees of stretch. Just getting clean unisons on spinets can be trying, as the imprecision of most of them makes a clean, level hammer strike impossible anyway. Or if you did get a clean strike, the bridge notching is often bad. You will *never* get a great tuning on many, many spinets, irrespective of the stretching issue. So there's really no reason to 'fret' (haha) over small theoretical issues like stretch. Save that for serious pianos and serious musicians.

Regards,

Rick Clark

-Robert Scott Ypsilanti, Michigan (Reply through newsgroups, not by direct e-mail, as automatic reply address is fake.)

You already have several surprisingly good answers to this question below, but let me add this; you don't really 'stretch' the tuning. The stretch is already there, you just tune the piano. The stretch is the inharmonicity in how the partials line up on a particular note. To illustrate, if you tune an octave beatless - say A4 and A5, you aren't tuning A4 to 880 hz. You are tuning it to the second harmonic of A4 which is a little more than 880hz. So, when it sounds beatless, the stretch is already there.

Gerry I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.

Thanks everybody for your comments...it clears things up. Gerry, are you saying that once the temperment is set and the rest of the piano is tuned by octaves the stretch will just happen? It sounds too easy somehow.

Yep, that's what I'm saying. Except, of course, the rest of the piano isn't normally tuned by octaves alone. We generally use double octaves for the higher tones and other combinations in the lower section. It would still work with straight octaves, but the overall tuning wouldn't sound as good. If you think about it, the second partial of any string is always slightly sharp. That's what gives you the stretch. Usually, the fourth partial will be somewhat more sharp and give more stretch. And no, it really isn't all that easy.

Gerry If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?