How were stringed instruments and pianos tuned before electronic tuners?
In: 1
With tuning forks.
A tuning fork is an acoustic resonator in the form of a two-pronged fork with the prongs formed from a U-shaped bar of elastic metal. It resonates at a specific constant pitch when set vibrating by striking it against a surface or with an object, and emits a pure musical tone once the high overtones fade out.
A quick Google search
Before electronic tuners were invented, musicians and instrument makers used a variety of methods to tune stringed instruments and pianos. One common method was to use a tuning fork, which is a device that produces a specific pitch when struck. The musician would strike the tuning fork and then use it to tune the instrument by matching the pitch produced by the fork to the pitch of the strings on the instrument.
Another method was to use a “reference pitch,” which is a known, fixed pitch that can be used as a point of reference for tuning. For example, the reference pitch for many orchestras is A440, which is the musical note A at a frequency of 440 Hz. The musician would tune the instrument by matching the pitch of the strings to the reference pitch.
Additionally, some musicians and instrument makers would use their ears to tune the instrument by listening carefully to the pitches produced by the strings and adjusting them until they were in tune with one another. This method can be difficult and requires a lot of skill and practice, but many musicians still use it today, even with the availability of electronic tuners.
Overall, the process of tuning an instrument without the use of electronic tuners can be time-consuming and challenging, but it is a crucial skill for any musician to learn.
The summer out of high school I worked in a piano factory. One of the tuners was a blind guy. While all the other tuners on the assembly line used tuning forks, his hearing was so exceptional that he could tune the piano without one.
So tuning fork is a good answer, but it is also worth mentioning that “tuning” is only important in a given context – we have standard tuning now so that people can take a piece of sheet music and play it and have it sound the same (or at least have the same notes) as anyone who uses that same tuning.
In the times before we cared about that, it was often enough to make sure that the instrument you played was in tune with itself, your voice, and/or your bandmates. If you were all in tune with each other, it wouldn’t matter if you were exactly in tune with A440 or any other instrument in the world save for your band.
(Also worth mentioning that a lot of tuning methods mentioned are still common – using an electronic tuner is great but when tuning my guitars at home I often just tune to whatever my A string currently sounds like, ignoring if it’s sharp or flat, or if I really care use a tuning fork to tune to A440)
My girlfriends piano tuner just plays the piano and corrects the notes that don’t sound right to his ear
It’s way more important that all instruments are tuned to each other, than to be tuned to the “correct” pitch. Any halfway decent musician can use their ear to make sure two instruments are tuned together.
In all likelihood, Beethoven’s symphonies in E minor were not perfectly tuned to E but they were close, and tuned to each other, which is fine for most purposes even in modern times.
There were three main ways. The first was to use something called a tuning fork, which is designed to emit a particular frequency when struck. Since a tuning fork doesn’t go out of tune this works.
The second was to tune your instruments so that they were in tune with each other. It doesn’t really matter if my A is exactly 440 hz (the standard middle A pitch), it matters that my A and the bass players A is the same.
The third, which is similar to the second, is to tune your instrument so that it was in tune with whatever the hardest thing to tune is. So for example tuning a guitar takes a minute, tuning a piano takes a really long time. So if I’m playing with a piano player I would tune my guitar to be in tune with the piano because it’s easier to tune. This practice resulted in regional variations in tuning in Europe. The hardest instrument to tune is a [pipe organ](https://www.kusc.org/culture/arts-alive-blog/chapman-challenge-pipe-organ/), tuning a pipe organ involves altering the lengths of the pipes, and there are a lot of them. For example the organ at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles has 6,134 pipes, and initial tuning when it was built took a full year. Since it was so tough to tune an organ, musicians would tune based on the local organ. This meant that if the organ closest to you had middle A at 438 hz rather than 440 hz you were playing at 438.
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