Piano Tuner

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Realistic, Conventional, Social
Piano tuners maintain and tune pianos by loosening or tightening the strings with a tuning hammer, to achieve the correct tone and balance. To get the right touch, piano tuners need to adjust moving parts. They may also perform mechanical repairs and restoration work on pianos.

Piano tuners perform minor repairs such as replacing broken or worn strings, and also major repairs such as rebuilding keyboards, replacing wooden bridges and rearranging components.

Piano tuners adjust the pedal action assembly on keyboards after testing and evaluating pianos for restoration. A piano tuner can also repair street organs and service accordions.

Before a piano tuner can carry out the actual tuning, it is necessary to determine whether the instrument needs any mechanical repair:

  • felt hammers can wear out or produce poor sound quality, they have to be replaced or scrapped
  • the tuning pins to which the strings are attached sometimes have to be replaced with a thicker set ? the piano keys have to be bleached or treated to restore the original color
  • when one of the steel strings breaks, it has to be replaced.

After the piano is cleaned and repaired, tuning can begin. Tuners, hammers and felt wedges are used, which are pressed between the strings. When the piano keys are played, the felt-covered hammers strike the piano's steel strings, causing the strings to vibrate. The number of times the string vibrates per second is called pitch.

Piano tuners adjust the piano strings to the proper pitch using tuning forks. A steel pin is turned to tighten or loosen the string until its pitch matches that of the tuning fork. The pitch of the "A" string is adjusted first and then the pitch of each of the other strings is adjusted in relation to the "A" string.

A piano is a very complex instrument. It contains about two hundred and thirty strings, eighty-eight keys and more than four thousand working parts, depending on the size and model.

There are two types of pianos: the upright piano and the grand piano. The largest concert grand piano has the longest string, about two hundred centimeters, while the shortest is approximately five centimeters long. The strings are tightly stretched and exert a pull of more than ten thousand kilograms on the frame to which they are attached.

 

Piano Tuner: what do they do?
Play instruments to evaluate their sound quality and to locate any defects. 95%
Adjust string tensions to tune instruments, using hand tools and electronic tuning devices. 89%
Disassemble instruments and parts for repair and adjustment. 85%
Inspect instruments to locate defects and determine their value or the level of restoration required. 85%
Repair cracks in wood or metal instruments, using binding wire, lathes, fillers, clamps or soldering irons. 84%
Reassemble instruments after repair, using hand and power tools and glue, hair, thread, resin or clamps, and lubricate instruments as needed. 83%
Compare instrument tones with the tones of tuning tools to tune them. 83%
String instruments, and adjust instrument trusses and bridges to obtain specified string tensions and heights. 80%
Repair or replace musical instrument parts and components, such as strings, bridges, felts and keys, using hand and power tools. 79%
Polish instruments, using cloths and polishing compounds, polishing discs or polishing tools. 78%