Dearest pianoexpert.. a year and a half ago I purchased a B1 PE type upright studio piano, confident that I was dealing with "serious" people, but the problems surfaced immediately; I am speaking in terms of "customer satisfaction." I called the company Tagliabue in Milan, which sold me the piano, and for the tuning, a technician showed up with a little digital gadget that, quite frankly, according to him, tuned the piano for the modest sum of 150 Euros, ignoring all the creaks and various noises from this or that part.... Having contacted the Italian Yamaha headquarters in Lainate via email, they sweetened the pill by reassuring me that I would be contacted by the Tagliabue company... 30 days have passed.. NOTHING of the sort.. and thank goodness I bought a new little piano with a two-year warranty.. I asked myself.. so much for customer satisfaction. I managed to fix the various creaks thanks to your WISE ADVICE and I thank you infinitely for this; I was wondering where the much-vaunted seriousness of the YAMAHA factory went, especially since the end customer, who shelled out a lot of money (3000)... for me, being a worker, that is a huge amount.. AM I NOT AT ALL SATISFIED? Forgive my outburst... and again many thanks to pianoexpert and to thesimon.. THANK YOU MY FRIENDS!!! regards saverio
Hi Saverio, it's always a pleasure to hear from you here on the forum and we are the ones who thank you for your constant participation. I am speaking to you as an "initiate" in the world of tuning, since I am neither a tuner nor a technician, but someone who follows the precious advice of my friend Paolo. So, I also tried tuning the piano once with these digital tools. There are two issues, one objective and one subjective. The first (the objective one) is that these tools do not take into account the inharmonicity or disharmony of the piano; therefore, it will never be possible to satisfactorily tune a piano with these tools, which is why I was never satisfied with them. The only time I was almost satisfied was when I did it by ear (among other things, being inexperienced), so imagine how useful these tools can be. Tuners are only good for telling you if you tuned the A correctly ahahaha, precisely because it is the reference point from which one starts with the tuning fork. The second (the subjective one) is that the sound of a piano tuned with those tools only fails to be annoying to a deaf person; so rather than speaking of a subjective problem, we are talking about a pseudo-subjective problem. Some tuners, from what I have seen, it's not that they don't know how to tune by ear, they simply have to hurry because tuning a piano in 2 hours as Paolo does by ear allows you to earn 300 euros a day if you manage to do at least 2 (which is not guaranteed since, depending on the general condition, a piano could take up half a day), whereas tuning with these devices in half an hour allows you to earn even 1000 euros a day. In the end, therefore, rather than a technical tuning choice for a good result on the instrument, it is an economic choice. However, these gentlemen do not understand that anyone with a shred of musical ear will never be satisfied with their tuning and will turn elsewhere (exactly what happened when I met Paolo, having tried at least 10 tuners before him who never satisfied me and who, when they came to tune, would just do a quick visit and run). Some tuners do it out of negligence and superficiality, others, as they say in Rome, out of haste... 😕. Others still because they improvise as piano tuners. In any case, being without modesty a SERIOUS and CORRECT person, I have always expressed my dissatisfaction to these individuals regarding the work done or, rather, poorly done.
The problem is that, at least personally, when I sit down at the piano, it's not that I feel the tuning was done superficially; it actually bothers my ears and my head when certain harmonic ratios that are clearly heard in chords are not achieved (see tuning lesson no. 4 on the harmonic ratios of the major 3rd, 4th and 5th, 8th and 10th). In essence, the tuner must have passion for their work but, above all, passion for the piano. I see this passion in Paolo, who is also a pianist (this perhaps reinforces the concept of passion for the instrument). In any case, the motivation that initially pushed us to open a website with a forum was precisely this: to clarify that it is not the tuner who should choose the sound your piano should have, but rather the tuner must be the translator of your language of dissatisfaction, trying to draw out from the instrument the sound you have in mind and not his own (obviously in relation to the quality of the piano; you cannot make a Yamaha B1, which is nonetheless a good studio piano, sound like a Steinway Grand Coda!). And the motivation behind our tutorials is precisely this: to provide a basis of fundamental concepts about the piano so that you can engage in a conscious dialogue with the tuner who comes to tune the piano at your home. When Paolo tunes my piano, he can give me advice on acoustics and other important matters, but when it comes to the voicing of the hammers, I am the one telling him: "I would like the sound more like this or more like that," because I am trying to pursue my own image of the piano sound, and he does everything to help me find it without imposing his own. Of course, one can have similar sonic tastes, and in fact, we often find ourselves in agreement.
As for the dirty tricks of various companies, as they say, dogs don't bite each other. I have always believed that one must do everything possible for customer satisfaction, whether it is someone buying a 130,000 euro concert grand or someone buying a vertical studio piano; therefore, you have all my support and all my indignation regarding what happened. Rather than being Yamaha's fault, I believe it is the dealer's fault; Yamaha has always manufactured good products.
Best regards, see you soon...
