Happy New Year! I’ve been so busy lately that I didn’t realize that this particular New Year marked the start of a new decade. A decade sounds like a long time, and I suppose it kind of is? But life is strange, the longer we go on, the shorter spans of time feel in proportion …
One of the most common questions I get from clients is “Why do you tune by ear?” (aka “Aural Tuning”) I get it. It’s not en vogue. There are many electronic tuning choices on the market, and even more now that the software is available as smartphone apps. In seemingly every way, tuning a piano …
Part of that is because although it is a critical part of what allows a piano to feel and sound its best, regulation is just not something most people have heard of, kind of like my sister’s former job title of “actuarial analyst”. But it’s also because there’s way more to it than what my distilled one sentence definition of “adjusting the many parts of the playing mechanism, called the action, in order to make the touch consistent and optimally responsive” implies.
