This is because hurling a felt hammer at a tense wire produces a more chaotic result than continuously forcing air through a pipe, or picking a string with a guitar pick.ĭifferent instruments have different levels of inharmonicity inherent in their design.
#Best piano tuning app series#
The harmonic series on a piano, however, is stretched, meaning that in many cases the 2nd harmonic is more than twice the frequency of the 1st harmonic, and all the other harmonics usually have higher values as well. The values in hertz of the harmonic series on the pipe organ are identical to the values of a pure harmonic series, where every octave up is twice the value of the octave below it. To return to the example from before, the harmonic series from a C4 played on a pipe organ doesn’t exactly match the harmonic series from a C4 played on a piano. Inharmonicity refers to the fact that, depending on the mechanism with which the note is sounded, the harmonic series shifts slightly. That’s where inharmonicity comes into play. This, as you will see, is not always straightforward. When tuning a C5 on a piano, for instance, the tuner has to make sure that the 1st harmonic is tuned to the 2nd harmonic in the C4 below it in a way that is pleasing to the ear, and so on and so forth. The first 6 harmonics in the series are vital in determining the best tuning for a piano. The 3rd harmonic is the first G after the 2nd harmonic and the 4th harmonic is two octaves above the 1st harmonic, or about 1048hz. So, if our sample note is C4, the 1st harmonic would be about 262hz and the 2nd harmonic would be about 524hz. The 2nd harmonic is roughly twice the frequency in hertz of the 1st harmonic, and in musical terms is one octave up. The frequencies in the series are also mathematically related to each other. This natural phenomenon is deeply intertwined with the formation of music. Ascending from that first C, the stack goes like this:Īs you may have noticed, all the notes in a C major chord, and then some, are present. When the note C is played, for instance, what that note consists of is a stack of frequencies with C at the bottom. For the purposes of this article I will refer to it as the harmonic series, and the specific frequencies within it as harmonics. It is also referred to as the overtone series or the partial series, because, apparently, having one name for it isn’t complicated enough. The range of frequencies contained in that note is known as the harmonic series. When a note is played on an instrument, your ear is actually hearing a stack of different frequencies at the same time. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of the harmonic series, inharmonicity, and how they affect tuning, the following will get you on your way. This means that pianos are tuned differently than guitars, so something that is meant for tuning guitars won’t work well on pianos. There are varying degrees of inharmonicity in instruments, and a piano has more inharmonicity than a guitar. An instrument is inharmonic if the tones it produces don’t line up with the harmonic series, which is an important factor in deciding the best tuning. The key difference between instruments from the perspective of tuning is something called inharmonicity. For example, a pipe organ is tuned differently than a piano because a pipe organ uses air forced through pipes, and a piano uses a felt hammer which is hurled at a tense wire. A good tuning on any given instrument, including pianos, will take into account the design of the instrument and the mechanism it uses to produce sound. There are subjective elements to tuning instruments, and an “accurate” tuning is a slightly shifting scale. It will sound awful to anyone with a decent ear, and downright unacceptable to piano players. The short answer is yes but it’s highly inadvisable. The first tuning I ever did was on a little Schumann grand piano with a guitar tuning app. It’s a question I’ve asked myself, before I became a piano technician. Many people wonder if they can simply tune their pianos with a guitar tuner.
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