How to Find the Bad Note when Tuning a Piano

Video Transcript

"On behalf of ExpertVillage.com this is Tom Flowers of Well Tempered Piano Tuning, showing you how you might clean up your own tuning on your own piano. A few basic things about tuning theory, you need to be able to first of all identify notes. For instance, all of these notes are C's. Now they should sound the same but each one will be higher as we go up the keyboard and lower as we go down the keyboard. Match tones is something you will need to develop. I'm going to play in this case an F, and first I'm going to get the irregularity out of that note. It happens to be in one of these side strings so as I place a mute on the left string and play in the middle against the right it’s basically fine but as I place a mute against the right string, there is the ring toning sound. So I locate the tuning pin corresponding to the left string and it sounds flat, or too low, so I'm going to pull the hammer towards me until the sound goes slightly above the previous pitch and I'll drop it down. Now that we have equalized that, we can compare it to the next step which has alot of problems. So I'm going to isolate down to one string, and that left string is quite flat, then pull the hammer towards me, now that I have the one string in tune I can listen to the next string against it. Until it equalizes and finally the last string, and now we have all three of the trichord that is the F chord, in tune. "