concert pitch tuning an old australian piano

[woobei]

hey guys

im new to pianos, im a guitarist.

my wife and i inherited an old W.H.Palling 85 key piano (Belling) from her family storage shed in queensland. it was put on the family truck and brought to sydney.

i checked the tuning on arrival. its tuned a semitone down and it's also slightly flat on every key.

becasue i wish to acompany my wife on piano with my guitar, i have to tune my guitar a whole step down. where i would rather the piano was concert pitch and we could use the piano to accompany all instruments in standard tuning.

now, the piano is old. some of the keys are a bit dodgy, so im not looking for purists to tell me i'm crazy im looking for junkshop advice on whether this piano will handle standard tuning for bashing out some childrens nursery rhymes with dad accompanying on guitar.

i read that old pianos cannot handle the tension of concert pitch. im also conscerned that the strings may break after all these years of being tuned a whole step down.

is there a tension reference on the web somewhere which will tell me tunings my piano will support? will the strings break, is there something i can do to prepare them for higher tuning?

i intend on doing it myself. with a Boss TU-12H chromatic tuner.

any advice more than welcome

cheers
woobei

[thierry13]

At worse simply change all the strings if they all break ... I do not think it will be THAT expensive. At best, simply tune it, if they break, you know what you have to do 

[rachfan]

Standard pitch for tuning pianos is A440 (440 vibrations/second on A below middle C).  There are inexpensive tuning forks available to set A properly. 

"Concert pitch", as you call it, is different.  Strictly speaking, concert pitch is a pitch very slightly more sharp than A440 and used in concert halls to add excitement to a performance.  I used to tune my Steinway grand and later my Baldwin grand at concert pitch.  After several years, I concluded that in the home setting concert pitch was just too shrill, so dropped the tunings down to A440 thereafter.

What you could do with the piano being a half tone flat is to bring it up more gradually to A440 by raising it a quarter tone in each of two tunings rather than all at once.  When you get it to A440, chances are that you'll need to re-tune more often as it will likely tend to go flat again, having been off-key for so long.  After a while it should settle out.  If you break a string, replace it.

You didn't say what the environmental conditions were in that storage shed.  Big humidity swings?  Leaky roof?  High heat in summer?  Dust infiltration?  Accessible to insects and mice?  If it's been subject to an uncontrolled environment, you may find the piano is pretty well shot before you even spend time trying to tune it.  I don't want to sound like a pessimist, but you won't know until you know. 

I take it you want  this to be a do-it-yourself project without a tuner/tech.  Good luck on that! 

[daniloperusina]

I agree with rachfan about going stepwise up on this piano to be on the safe side.
Remember that you will be adding hundreds of kilos of pressure when you raise the pitch. Alltogether the strings have a pressure of around 10 to 20 tons (!) depending on the size, so this is why caution is often advisable on old pianos that have not been tuned in a long while.
I'm a tuner, and I'll give you some advise:

If a string breaks, have a mikrometer handy so that you can measure the exact thickness of the string. This is very important!

Basically, raising the pitch is achieved by going too high to start with. To raise half a semitone, do the first notes half a semitone plus half of half a semitone. Tune the rest to these, and when you're done the piano is up half a semitone. This is because the pitch will sink while you're tuning. (Because of the increased total pressure.)

(If you use that boss thing to raise the pitch, the notes you started with will have sunk when you're done and the whole piano will be out of tune. You'll have to come up with a way to compensate for that.)

To avoid breaking strings, first de-tune each string. Old rusty strings tend to get stuck at different places and immediately break when raised.

Basic tuning technique is to first go slightly sharp, than gradually lowering into pitch, hammering the key a bit to equalize string pressure all over the string. The tuning pin itself is slightly elastic and you'll notice a difference just by pressing a little bit with the tuning hammer.

When tuning the two and three string unisons, you have to make them exactly in tune with each other. Exactly in the meaning of sounding like one string! There should be no obvious 'swings' in the sound during at least 2-3 seconds. If you fail with this the piano will not sound in tune.

The treble section, the last third of the keyboard, is often plagued with 'false strings'. You'll hear it when you notice that one isolated string sounds like two strings heftily out of tune with each other. You'll have to try to ignore that and aim at what appears to be the strings basic pitch.

The higher in the treble and the lower in the bass you get, the more difficult it gets to actually hear any pitch. I'm not kidding. The last octave, or half an octave, is extremely difficult! You'll easily loose track and hear no pitch at all, and consequently raise the strings way to much and break them!

If you decide that tuning the whole piano (roughly 240 strings!) is too difficult to start with, I'd caution you against tuning and raising the pitch only in, say, the middle section. The strings are calibrated to more or less equally distribute the pressure over the whole construction. So if you raise only a portion you risk a major crash because one section receives way to much pressure!

But anyway, if I remember correctly, any piano from the 20th century is constructed to be on A=440, so as long as nothing is broken, the gluejoints are fine and the strings are in good condition, and the tuning pins are firm in the tuningblock, there is actually no risk in pulling it up to pitch.

I assume that you'll use a proper tuning hammer! If not, you'll destroy the entire piano beyond repair!

Hiring a piano tuner will save you enourmous amounts of trouble, but if you insist on trying yourself, good luck!

[woobei]

thanks very much for those replys guys.

i will buy a cheapie tuning kit, hammer, mutes and give it a go.

i will take it down half a step first to give the strings some time to get used to being changed. leave it over night.

then take it back up hlaf a step at a time till i get to 'regular' 440 tuning where middle c is actually a c.

if i break any strings i will get them replaced but im not expecting any to break now

cheers
woobei

[rachfan]

Hi woobei,

When you order a tuning kit, be sure that the head of the tuning lever is solid steel and not a funky shiny metal alloy.  Also get the star grip configuration in the head rather than the square configuration, as it will give you more flexibility in positioning the hammer.  Finally, avoid the crane head that angles off the handle.  Instead get a head that is more perpendicular to the handle, as it is safer when you're applying force.

I once had a cheap tuning lever on hand here.  My Baldwin grand had recently been restrung including new tuning pins one size greater.  There were a few "jumpy" pins that had not settled out.  A string on one of those needed touching up.  When I put torque on the lever, the pin would not turn.  The next thing that happened was that the metal alloy head shattered!  The force of the release threw my hand against the metal plate, but I was not injured.  I was also lucky that a metal fragment didn't fly up into my eye.  I found one alloy fragment quickly, but couldn't locate the second one for a week, even after taking the action out.  I finally discovered it when I got an odd ping sound on a treble string.  It was lying on top of the "waste string"  underneath a plate strut and just out of sight.  Here's a picture of the remains of that tuning lever.  When I snapped it the second metal fragment was still missing.

[rachfan]

Hey danilo,

The truth finally comes out!  No wonder you've mentioned the tuning of my piano in some of my recordings--you're a tuner!   

[pianodoc]

You may want to download a copy of Tunelab if you have a windows laptop.  Even just using the "average" tuning will allow for some stretch to make the piano sound a little better.  Otherwise, with the Boss, tune a few octaves in the middle and then begin tuning up and down from there.  As you get a few octaves away, check back to those middle octave to see if the double or triple octaves still sound good.

Just assume that you will be going through the piano multiple times... it will be very much like putting new strings on a guitar - EVERYTHING will be in motion until the whole structure gets settled down.

I'm just beginning to put some videos on youtube for piano tuning hints.  Search under pitch raise, or verituner.  There is a 6 part series showing a one-hour two pass tuning and the new one is how to use the rubber mutes.  I'll be adding more videos as time goes on.

good luck!

[daniloperusina]

I actually just graduated as a tuner from my own school of tuning!
But what do you do when you live in a country where there are no other schools available...

I agree about tunelab! It's shareware so you download it for free, and it's a great program! I used to use the 'average' tuning file. I had the program play the notes for me using headphones, and I've tuned about 40-50 pianos with that with great results.

Here's the link to tunelab97, free download:
https://www.tunelab-world.com/tl97.html

Tunelab's homepage:
https://www.tunelab-world.com