We have added this new feature. I have never seen anything like this on the Web, so we may be the first to give our customers the deepest and darkest secret of this profession-- a stretch code. The crazy thing about this though is that the theory of stretch is possibly the most controversial aspect of tuning musical instruments. Virtually every piano tuner thinks his stretch notions are the best, and I bet mine are the best of all :-)

Having said that, it is folly friend to think this is not that important, and you better make up your mind where your own ideas of stretch will land, for you will not make many friends by not bothering with stretch. I am hearing that many guitar and string musicians are now trying to add temperament to their instruments. Years ago, only piano tuners bothered with temperament. This is changing, and I am sure it will not be long before stretch will become more important with stringed instruments and so on.

You MUST read about Stretch in our instructions on that topic. Otherwise, this page will make no sense at all.

This Stretch Page is a selection of charts which give you various stretch scales which the tuning professionals have come to generally agree on. Our charts are developed to be used with electronic tuning meters, and they are in fact the stretch scale found programed into most high quality tuning meters. You can use them if you tune by ear by following the instructions for adding stretch to your tunings, and work out a method of your own for figuring out where you are. As you do the very top octaves, it may be hard to actually count the beats called for, but in this case, "close" will be good enough.

This Stretch Page is most helpful where a tuning meter is in use. We offer several meters which do not have stretch built in. Simply calculate the number of beats called for in the chart or the note you are tuning, and set the meter needle or display for that amount of beats. This works well with the Korg OT-12M and the Peterson VS-1. You can even do this in a limited way with the Sabine 1500 meter. The sharp LED blinks out the number of beats per second you are sharp. So, if you can count the number of times the sharp LED blinks in a second, you can get near, but not very accurately.

Stretching the bass with a meter and the Stretch Charts is done the same way. I should note here that the charts call for a steady stretch starting almost from the center of the piano on some charts. I would suggest you do not do this. It is not easy to set up such a tuning, and I am not convinced it sounds right. It leaves a slow beat in almost all octaves, and I refuse to believe this is going to sound right to most of us.

I do NOT do this myself. I start stretching the treble at key #64, or maybe a few notes sooner. I do not start stretching the bass much until about the last octave. However; I admit that I sort of let the second from the lowest octave kind of cave in a bit, and this allows a bit of taper. I find that many pianos set up nasty overtones and false beats in the bass if I do not do this.

I must make this very clear. These charts will not produce a really accurate stretch tuning unless you have a meter with temperament built in, or unless you master temperament by ear. You must have the temperament right, for the stretch here is assuming it is added to the tempered octave as it is reproduced along the scale from the middle octave to through the treble and through the bass. Thus, to master the stretch as an amateur, you must have a meter with temperament. We offer two-- the Korg OT-12M and the Peterson VS-1. The Peterson tuner will not be available until sometime in June of 2001.

Now, if your final result sounds a bit off, you may indeed solve the problem by more extreme stretch, for overtones ARE solved in many cases by more extreme stretch, and some pianos have a scale that is terrible about this. In this case, do whatever it takes to clear out the nasty overtones and make for better sound. I have one Steinway I tune which requires extreme stretch in the bass to get rid of ugly overtones.

Now, you will note at once that the charts cover C-0 to B-7. A piano of 88 keys only covers A-0 to C-8. Worse yet, C-8 is not on the chart, right? Well, this chart covers the lowest bass found in any instrument in the orchestra, and C-8 is missing because it is nearly impossible to count the beats, and most tuning meters cannot hold it long enough to get a reading. If you meter reads C-8, then taper it on up on the curve. The best thing is to tune C-8 by ear and leave it at that. Anyway, C-8 would not fit neatly in the table in invented :-)

Thus, the Red Numbers are the scale of an 88 note piano keyboard. Be sure to only use them and do not start at 1.

You will notice that the smaller the piano, the greater the stretch. This is because the higher quality, and the longer the strings in the piano, the less overtones and noise you must deal with. Also, the smaller pianos go out of tune faster, and the treble stretch can drop badly in spinets and consoles during weather changes. So, extreme stretch in smaller pianos compensates for these troubles.

Having said that, you need to be aware that there are big old uprights which have rather long strings and were well made long ago. They may be clearer than many small and studio grands. If you find one of these, and you realize it has little overtone trouble and holds pitch well, use less extreme stretch on that piano, both bass and treble.

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