Piano Video Lesson: Can an Out of Tune Piano Have More Sustain?

Hi. This is Robert Estrin at livingpianos.com, your online piano store. The question today is can an out of tune piano have more sustain than a piano that's perfectly tuned? The simple answer to this question, believe it or not, is yes, but I need to explain how and why.

If you look inside of a piano, you know that all the notes have more than one string except in the very bottom. Most notes have three strings. Now if you know anything about the acoustics of the strings vibrating, if they're vibrating perfectly with one another, you'll get a certain level of sustain. But if one string is just ever so slightly out of tune with another string, there'll be a wave created, a very, very slow wave. If that wave is about the same length of time as the sustain of a note, it will actually enhance the sustain of the note more than if it was absolutely dead on.

Now I went to talk to a piano tuner who claimed that they purposely de-tune the piano precisely to get the maximum amount of sustain. I've talked to other piano tuners who said that this was total nonsense and I really want to hear from all of you.

My feeling is this, that striving to tune a piano is hard enough. Once it's in tune, it's going out of tune little by little. Even if you try to make the piano perfectly in tune, every unison phase locked where they didn't drift at all, in a very short amount of time, some of the notes would be drifting slightly sharper or more likely flat, causing that slight de-tuning that would add to the sustain, as long as the de-tuning doesn't become so great that the cycle is shorter than the length that the note sustains, that the strings sustain naturally.

Indeed a slightly out of tune piano, that the wave cycle is less than the sustained length of the sustain of the notes will sustain more than a perfectly in tune piano. But I wouldn't necessarily de-tune your piano to try to get this effect. Believe me, it'll de-tune itself well enough just from playing it.

Thanks for all the great questions. Keep them coming into here at robert@livingpianos.com, your online piano store. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/piano-myths/can-an-out-of-tune-piano-have-more-sustain/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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