Learning a noisy musical instruments

[Yellow Fang]

I fancy getting an upright piano for the sitting room. I gather most pianos are digital these days, but you can get analogue pianos. I think a lot of them are second hand. Are they a pain to tune? How often do you have to tune them? Do you need a set of tuning forks? I'd have thought some sort of frequency analyser would do the job, maybe even a phone app.

 

[icowden]

I fancy getting an upright piano for the sitting room. I gather most pianos are digital these days, but you can get analogue pianos. I think a lot of them are second hand. Are they a pain to tune? How often do you have to tune them? Do you need a set of tuning forks? I'd have thought some sort of frequency analyser would do the job, maybe even a phone app.

You will easily find second hand pianos. It's worth finding someone you know who plays the piano to assess whether you are getting something that should be consigned to the scrapheap.

You can't tune them yourself without training and tuning wrenches (You need more than one). It's hard to do as once you get out of the deep bass notes you are looking at two or three strings that have to be tuned harmonically to produce a single tone. The strings are also under enormous tension - you really don't want to snap one. You usually pay a professional piano tuner to do it. It costs upwards of £60 depending on where you are in the country. They only need tuning maybe every 3 years or longer if they are kept in a normal heated room. Mine needs doing, but hasn't been tuned for 5 years.

The hard bit is getting the piano transported to your house. They are very heavy. Digital pianos are really good now, but they never have the action or character of a real piano..