Pianos Can't Be Tuned

You can tune a guitar, violin, viola, cello or brass instrument perfectly.

But you can’t tune a piano perfectly.  And it’s not a minor, unnoticed, immeasurable difference.  What you hear is slightly out of tune and your mind takes care of that; you’re hearing what you imagine to be an in-tune piano.

By the way, because of its range of notes and the speed of its action, most modern music (say, in the last two hundred years or so) has been composed at the piano.  The piano is a slightly-out-of-tune musical giant.

Why can’t the piano be tuned perfectly?  “It has too many strings!” See this link:

http://www.realclearscience.com/video/2015/09/18/its_impossible_to_tune_a_piano.html

And here’s a prediction from me: We’re going to soon wind up with a world of digital pianos only.  The analog piano that requires tuning is just too labor-intensive.  It requires too much maintenance.  The better an analog piano sounds –the deeper and throatier the base, as well as the brilliance or “brightness” of the treble – the harder it is to mike for recordings.  Samples of concert grands are getting closer and closer to sounding like the “real thing,” and these digital imitations are easy to mike and don’t require tuning.  They are going to take over.

Don’t go into piano tuning as a profession.  Don’t buy or set up a piano showroom.  The whole profession is being automated.  Analog piano sales are way down in recent years.  Oh.  Digital pianos can also teach students to play the piano faster than the beginners can learn on an analog piano.  And a digital piano with MIDI can be used with a computer and music composition program to create a synthetic orchestra!  Some music colleges require students to submit complete orchestral works as the equivalent of term papers. 

Is the computer driven synthetic orchestra going to dethrone rock-and-roll in a way punk and rap have failed to accomplish?!  Something along these lines has already happened with computerized soundtracks dominating the genre of modern instrumental music.  You can make this comparison by listening to John Barry’s 1964 soundtrack for Goldfinger and comparing it to the about-to-be-released soundtrack for Spectre by Thomas Newman.