Why You Can Never Tune a Piano

Grab a cup of cof­fee, put on your think­ing cap, and start work­ing through this video from Minute Physics, which explains why gui­tars, vio­lins and oth­er instru­ments can be tuned to a tee. But when it comes to pianos, it’s an entire­ly dif­fer­ent sto­ry, a math­e­mat­i­cal impos­si­bil­i­ty. Pianos are slight­ly but nec­es­sar­i­ly out of tune.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

How the Clavi­chord & Harp­si­chord Became the Mod­ern Piano: The Evo­lu­tion of Key­board Instru­ments, Explained

What Does the World’s Old­est Sur­viv­ing Piano Sound Like? Watch Pianist Give a Per­for­mance on a 1720 Cristo­fori Piano

The Mak­ing of a Stein­way Grand Piano, From Start to Fin­ish


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Comments (8)
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  • Rod Stasick says:

    “In tune” … “out of tune.”
    What does this even mean?

  • Jeff Daniels says:

    Rod,

    “In tune” means the har­mon­ic sequence(s) asso­ci­at­ed with the strings align and res­onate with the high­est pos­si­ble ener­gy [or equiv­a­lent­ly with the least amount of dis­so­nance]. While the video was alge­braical­ly cor­rect, as a musi­cian and math­e­mati­cian, the pre­sen­ta­tion lacked infor­ma­tive val­ue.

    Check out wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)

    Regard­ing the arti­cle, the author has made a fun­da­men­tal [small joke] error. The gui­tar strings can all be har­mon­i­cal­ly tuned using the fourths and major third, but every chord that involves using frets will be out of tune. Why? Because the frets are spaced using the ratio of the equal tem­pera­ment sys­tem — just like the mod­ern piano.

    J.S.Bach was a major pro­po­nent of equal tem­pera­ment which allowed him to com­pose in all keys. For a fab­u­lous expla­na­tion and his­tor­i­cal overview, see Ross Duffins’ “How Equal Tem­pera­ment Ruined Har­mo­ny”.

  • Tom says:

    What sur­prised me about this clever video was that there was no men­tion of Bach’s Well Tem­pered Clavier. In com­pos­ing The Well Tem­pered Clavier, Bach had as one of his motives a prac­ti­cal demon­stra­tion that one could com­pose and play in all keys on an instru­ment whose tun­ing was nec­es­sar­i­ly tem­pered.

  • john says:

    The video is fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect. It sug­gests that the piano can’t be ‘tuned’. This is a non­sense state­ment. It can’t be tuned to sim­ple inte­ger ratios, but a 12-note octave, which is what is used in West­ern music, com­prised of note relat­ed by sim­ple interg­er ratios is a math­e­mat­i­cal impos­si­bil­i­ty and NOT the tun­ing sys­tem used in west­ern any­way. Musi­cal tun­ings are cul­tur­al inven­tions and vary, as can be seen with Game­lan and Thai music. There is no uni­ver­sal stan­dard for ‘in tune’ and the Pythore­an mod­el explaibed in the video was aban­doned hun­dreds of years ago.A gui­tar can be tuned using har­mon­ics but doing so will make it out of tune with itself because tun­ing strings to the inter­val of a fifth by elim­i­nat­ing beat­ing makes it out of tune open with equal tem­pera­ment, which is the tun­ing sys­tem it is made for.

  • Steve says:

    As Jeff Daniels said above, the gui­tar (and all stringed instru­ments) are tuned to the equal tem­pered scale, the same as a piano.

    I thought this arti­cle (video) was going to be about Stretch Tun­ing, which is done on a piano due to the inhar­monic­i­ty of the strings, espe­cial­ly the thick wound ones in the bass.

    The bass notes are tuned pro­gres­sive­ly flat­ter, and the tre­ble strings are tuned sharp­er so that the out of tune har­mon­ics of the low­er notes do not clash with the fun­da­men­tals of the high­er notes.

    A long stringed piano ( e.g. a con­cert grand) needs much less stretch­ing than small­er pianos like a con­sole or spinet.

  • Steve says:

    Cor­rec­tion: I should have said FRETTED stringed instru­ments in my post above.

  • Rod Stasick says:

    Dis­so­nance? Con­so­nance?
    High­est pos­si­ble “ener­gy”
    equat­ing with the least dis­so­nance.
    What cen­tu­ry is this?

  • Rod Stasick says:

    Can you tuna fish?

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