Video: How to Use an Electronic Piano Tuner

Part 1 - Learn how to use an electronic piano tuner in this free video lesson on care and tuning for musical instruments.

Video Transcript

On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Tom Flowers of Well Tempered Piano Tuning here to talk to you about piano tuning and maintenance. This blue box to my left, although it looks kind of archaic because I think they chose very funny colors for something so advanced, is a tuner that can deal with the extensities of piano tuning. And unlike the guitar or other instruments where the intervals are equal. For instance, this A when in tune is four hundred and forty vibrations per second. Therefore, to be one octave higher, you would need to be at eight-eighty or double the former frequency. Now, if you did that on the piano, the piano would sound very dull. Even a pedestrian listener would not like it. So as these notes go up, we do something we call stretching. These intervals actually get larger than they should be and that is what makes a piano striking. That is that scintillation that's at that top of the tone. Well, this tuner is intelligent enough to know that. So as I open it, it evaluates three notes; F3, A4, and C6 and they're partials. And in so doing, it will figure out what kind of tuning there needs to be for this type of piano. So I'm going to now listen to this note, the middle string and as the lights are moving left, it tells me it's flat. As I bring it up and drop it in the middle like that and now I will listen an octave higher and zero out those beams and here we are. It has now evaluated that note. We'll listen to this note and we'll use the same procedure for all three notes. At the end of that, I'll hit a button and it will calculate a tuning that is proper for this piano for A0, the first three notes on the piano are known as zero, all the way up to C8, the final note on the piano.

How to Use an Electronic Piano Tuner

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