Piano Tuning: A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs (Dover Books On Music: Piano)

This book is ancient, I think from the early 20th century, but still holds true and is an excellent and straight forward resource. As a pianist, it has been a revelation to understand how it is done, and even more fun to actually achieve a reasonable tuning myself (with a little help from my professional piano tuning friend.. OK, so I cheated a little...!). Highly recommended. To make life a little easier, I recommend getting a quality electronic (chromatic) tuner to tune the middle octave, after that use the octaves and 5ths to do the rest. Full marks to Dover - again. They provide a great collection of classics on music, especially piano related stuff. I think I have perhaps 5-6 books by this publisher.

While I have not seen many other books about piano tuning, I was surprised how this book always comes straight to the point. It covers not only how to tune a piano, but also how a piano works (upright and grand), how to repair it and the theory of temprament.The book has originally been written in 1907 for people who wanted to become piano tuner. In the recent edition, however, they removed the chapters on Business Hints and Charges :-)If you own a piano and you want to maintain it yourself, this book is for you.