Anne Francis
Piano Tuner-Technician
How a piano is NOT (normally) supposed to sound… January 14th, 2012
The other day on CBC Radio 2 Shift, Tom Allen played a song I hadn’t heard before:
Sleep in Late, by his fellow CBC announcer, Molly Johnson. You can listen to it here.
It’s a nice song, eh?
Now listen to it again, and notice how the piano accompaniment sounds. Really listen to it.
This is the sound of a purposely detuned piano!
I’m listening to the song, driving up Jarvis street, thinking, my god, that piano sounds terrible! But I realized two things: one, of course they purposely made it sound like that, to give a sort of honkytonk feel to the piece. And two, only a piano technician would think it sounded bad! I was tickled when it was over and Tom, the host, commented on the sound of the piano. (Being a fine musician himself, he notices stuff like this.)
If you’ve ever looked inside a piano, you’ll know that most of the notes in the midrange and treble sections of the keyboard have three strings, and a big part of the tuner’s job is to make sure that each of those strings is tuned in perfect unison with its mates. In fact, unison tuning is considered the most important aspect of tuning–because it’s the most noticeable when it’s not right. (It may also be the easiest aspect of tuning to learn, and the hardest to master.) So when we tune a piano we are (almost) always aiming for perfect, or “clean” unisons.
Except in extremely rare cases, like this one, where a honkytonk effect may be what we’re after. (There may be other ways to accomplish this, such as the “mandolin” attachment on old player pianos, or pushing thumbtacks into the felt of each hammer!) Usually we first tune one string of a unison relative to the other notes in the octave (this is called interval tuning), and then the other two strings are tuned to match it. I figure in this case the piano was given a regular tuning in the studio, so that one string per note was tuned correctly, and then the unisons were either left as they were (i.e. out of tune), or altered just a hair, to give that jangly sound.
(I tried to find out who tuned the piano for this song, but so far I have not been successful.)
I thought this was an interesting example of knowing the rules well enough to break them, to interesting effect.
I noticed it was out of tune too. Makes for a great honky tonk sound. I think most people with a good musical ear would pick up on it. What a great effect.
I forgot to ask if you think that this might be the same thing that was done to Sarah McLachlan’s Last Dance? Every time I listen to that song I notice how different the piano sounds. Thanks for the education!
Hi Leslie! Thanks for your responses. I just listened to that song Last Dance for the first time. Yes, it’s a similar effect, and probably achieved in much the same way. One thing though: I could be wrong, but the piano in Sleep in Late sounds to me like a decent grand that was just detuned for this track, but the piano in Last Dance sounds like some of the old beat-up uprights I tune on a regular basis! The tone is really the tone of strings that are 100 years old… which might actually be more of an authentic sound for this piece. (Never mind that to me it sounds like nails on a chalkboard!) I love the cello and theremin, though.
I think it’s interesting to note that both pianos are basically in tune with themselves, i.e. the octaves and intervals are correctly tuned, which they would not be if the piano REALLY hadn’t been tuned in 25 years and the unisons were as far out as they’ve made them here.
Well, I have an update… I heard back from the record company guy that the song was recorded in the kitchen of the producer’s house, on an old upright piano they purposely just didn’t bother tuning at all!!! So much for my intricate theory.
Hey Anne, just getting caught up on your blog, and like Leslie, I thank you for the education! It was a great theory, and before I read your Jan 19 post, I wondered if you had tweeted Tom Allen or Molly re this (they often read from the CBC R2 twitter feeds on air). Didn’t realize that in this technological age, recordings might be done in a producer’s kitchen!
Yes–not everything is high-tech, apparently.