My new piano tuner just left.
Oh. my. goodness.

It sounds amazing!!! Also, yay, I don't need acoustic panels in here.

Oh wow. It sounds soooo good. After tuning, he had me play and I played a few pieces in different keys and we talked about specific notes in the upper registers. Then he did some light, very light, voicing in those areas.

And now it sounds amazing!! My beautiful piano is back, after a year (of two unpleasant tunings in a row). How I missed her! šŸŽ¶

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ETA sorry for yelling in the thread title... šŸ˜…

    Nice! Now get back to your appointment, you’re running late! šŸ™‚

    Holy clickbait on a cracker 😃 Now there's a thread title I couldn't avoid opening! Congrats on finding the right person at last!

    @Sophia sorry!! Didn’t mean to creat clickbait!!
    šŸ˜…šŸ˜…šŸ˜…

    I’ll have to write a proper report later, under a different title!

    Haha noooo I loved it!

    So no apparent damage from the movers?

    So glad to hear you have an amazing tuning, @ShiroKuro.

    This is starting to give me "Grand Obsession" vibes! @navindra, isn't there some way to map a current tuning using some of the existing ETD apps? It might be well worth the effort to "document and record" what this tuning sounds like, so if ShiroKuro ever has to change tuners (or moves again), at least there is a template that clearly shows exactly what the tuning that she likes is, and can avoid the frustrating exercise of trying to describe a tuning for them to replicate.

      Gombessa

      I wonder if it would be exactly the same when another tuner copies it. Tuning is a form of art. I expect it's a bit like copying a painting, it will look like it but there are differences.

        Josephine my old tech said it won't work because you have to listen to the overtones. But I think copying a good tuning will at least get you closer to what you want than relying on a random person to give you a mystery tuning, if you have no other choice!

        Ohhh how lovely!! ā¤ļø

        (I only found this thread now.)

        *
        ... feeling like the pianist on the Titanic ...

        Right… I’m trying to remember what a friend explained to me about tuning so I can write it here… I think the problem is that there is a range of ā€œacceptabilityā€ (for lack of a better word) for a particular note to be ā€œin tuneā€ at a particular frequency. And where one tuner falls in tuning that note could be,say, on the left side of that range, while another tuner could fall on the right side of that range. And so numerically speaking, you might have the same tuning, the tuning competed by tuner #1 will sounded different from the ā€œsameā€ tuning completed by tuner #2.

        Oh btw, remember my description of the tuning I didn’t like as ā€œshimmeryā€? Well I thought it was because maybe it was some kind of slightly well-tempered tuning. But a tuner on another site told me that maybe it was because it was an equal temperament tuning that was ā€œtoo clinical.ā€ I thought that was fascinating, and also it makes sense because I don’t think the ā€œshimmery tunerā€ was a bad guy, and I asked him to do an ET tuning, so I have no reason to believe he didn’t.

        Back to @Gombessa and my most recent tuning… I don’t think I necessarily have just one tuning that I like, so even if I could get this exact tuning copied, I don’t know that I would… I think the problem is there are clearly some tunings that I specifically don’t like, and all I want to do is avoid those!

        It’s complicated though, isn’t it! 🧐

          ShiroKuro maybe it was because it was an equal temperament tuning that was ā€œtoo clinical.ā€

          I think when I was complaining about "crunchiness" that it was probably what you meant by "shimmery". It was definitely a very clinical ET tuning and it was horrible. Ugh.

          I know I like Perfect 12ths tuning on my piano but it turns out that it means different things on different pianos because each piano has different inharmonicity!! 😮 Now we think I like Perfect 12ths but with more stretch than what the device calculated for my piano because it has less inharmonicity than a Steinway. It is so much more complicated than I ever imagined. I did really like the Perfect 12ths tuning a different tech did using his app but I like my current tech more as the long term caretaker for my piano. He thinks he's figured out what app the other guy used and is going to try to replicate that setting.

          I miss my original tech. I always remind myself that my needing to find a new tech is just a minor life problem.

          @twocats your post reminds me of how hard it is to articulate these things… so I wonder if ā€œstretchā€ is the word i want for what I called a range above… IOW, an A that:s in tune can have a range of actual realizations of what counts as in tune, and that’s the stretch?

          Also, crunchy and shimmery seem different to me… do you think crunchy is metallic? Because the shimmery tuning to me had a metallic edge that was quite harsh.

          Mu new tuner talked about this problem, articulating the tuning with words. And before he retired from his job as University head tuner, he trained young tuners as well, so he talked about how hard it is to do anything with words.

            ShiroKuro metallic, yes! It was harsh, almost discordant in some chords to my ears.

            Stretch to my understanding means that as you go up the A's get slightly higher. I think it can give you more room to create nice intervals? Apparently techs call it the "New York stretch" because a Steinway concert tuning has a lot of it. My old tech said he put a Steinway concert tuning on my piano. Well, I'll know in a week or two whether the new tech can get a nice tuning on my piano... I wasn't thrilled with the last two (they were acceptable, not terrible but also not sweet sounding) but he listens to my feedback and tries to figure out what that might mean in terms of what to do next time.

            Ahh so stretch isn’t what I was talking about with ā€œrange.ā€

            Stretch is based on the same note in different octaves, right?

              Most people do not realize that a beautiful tuning does not come from having a perfect equal temperament in the central octave e.g. A3-A4 or the correct stretch for the inharmonicity of you individual instruments.
              Aural tuners are trained in a specific way to count beats for intervals in the central octave in order to make them as even as possible. Most teachers have their own version of which intervals to start with, but in the end it boils down to having the same quality of beats when you play a chromatic scale of thirds in that area.
              ETDs these days are doing doing a perfect job to achieve this - and they are agnostic to imperfections of the human ear when it comes to represent the perfect equal temperament of the section that initially has the red felt strip that mutes the outer strings.
              This is not where the beauty of a really good tuning comes from, it's tuning the unisons that makes all the difference.

              I wrote a little piece in /r/piano that might be helpful to give you an idea of why I wrote this bold statement:

              Most people are stuck in tuning unisons to sound beatless on their fundamental. This won't get you anywhere in terms of tuning beautiful unisons.

              Before you start tuning unisons you should put away the tuning hammer, put wedges between the strings so only one string can be heard. And then you sit down and listen to that one string. If you don't know what to listen for, you will be stuck with the fundamental, but that's not where the music plays.

              Take F3 as your starting point and listen to the cacophony of other notes contained in this one string. You need to understand that every single string by nature contains overtones/harmonics and you need to learn to listen to these and train your ears to filter them out. Hitting F3 will give you F4, C4, F5 as a first starting point of what to listen for. Hit the note, then hit the first overtone (mute it, so only one string is heard), go back to F3 and now try to hear the octave to F4 contained therein.

              Take this step by step, don't rush, just make sure that your brain learns to identify various overtones correctly every time you hit your blueprint note.

              There will be a point where you will identify A5 or even A6 as harmonics contained in your beloved F3 - and this is where fun starts. Soon you will be able to identify this major third consistently as part of your F3. And this is the time where you pull out the wedge and move it so that now there are two strings of the unison that can be tuned. Leave the first string alone and focus on the second one in trying to tune it. I believe by now you know where this is going.

              You are now supposed not to tune F3 but A5 or A6. Use the filter you trained your ears to listen to and focus on the beats of A5 or A6. Your goal must be to tune these overtones beatless.

              The physics behind it is simple. If your fundamental is almost beatless i.e. like half a beat per second, your ear will be happy and tell you that it's tuned OK. Well, it is not. F4 is already off by one beat per second, F5 is off by two beats per second and F5 is off by four beats per second. This exponential drift is what makes seemingly well tuned fundamentals sound off anyway.

              Beautiful unisons come from tuning high overtones, usually fifths and major thirds.

              That's the gist of it.