Did you detect a slight tone of confidence in my earlier words? Pluck? Spirit? Hubris even?
Gone. Dead. Pining for the fjords.
Learning to tune a piano is possibly the hardest thing I have ever tried. See, you don’t actually tune a piano, you put it out of tune in a very specific way so that it sounds good in a way we have become accustomed to. Are you a guitar player? Guitars are tuned pure - it’s called Just Temperament if you’re a music nerd - in a way that makes tuning them fairly simple to tune. Adjust the tuning peg until the sound of two strings stops beating. Done.
Pianos are tuned to Equal Temperament which is a different thing entirely, and is entirely a frustrating and maddening thing to try to execute, especially for a beginner. You are actually putting beats in between different notes instead of eliminating them like on a guitar. Sometimes you put in one beat per second, sometimes it’s 3 beats in every 5 seconds, sometimes it’s 7, 8 or 9 beats per second for chrissakes! How is this done? Why by ear of course. No fancy schmancy electronical devices allowed.
My entire feelings of self worth have become tied to how well I set a temperament on any given day. Not good. Still loving every minute of it but not good.
