About
What, why, and how?
1) What is piano tuning?
Your piano carries 88 black (or, ebony) and white (or, ivory) keys. Each of the keys on your piano corresponds to a particular pitch, or tone.
Piano tuning is the art of making precise, minute adjustments to the tension of your piano’s strings so as to achieve two main objectives: one, for each individual key to sound crisply and clearly (i.e. without distortion), and two, so that the intervals between keys sound in tune.
2) Why do I need to tune my piano on a regular basis?
The fact that you are looking for a piano tuner shows you have probably sensed that your ebony and ivory may not be living together in such perfect harmony any more. (Get the Paul McCartney song reference? Get it?) There are a number of signs that something has gone wrong. Any of the following sound familiar?
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The keys do not sound in harmony with each other.
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Your piano’s overall tone has started to come out a little dead or boring over recent weeks, no matter how much you try to apply that frolich direction.
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The mechanical action of depressing the keys has grown sluggish or causes unwanted scraping noises.
What has gone wrong? Keep in mind that a piano's strings are constantly bearing incredibly high tension - some 18 tons in total, believe it or not - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thus, even when a piano is seldom played, its strings naturally lose some of that tension as time passes, causing it to go out of tune.
Furthermore, changes in humidity and temperature also have an effect on the strings. For example, in local context, high humidity (i.e. a lot of water vapour in the atmosphere) can cause the piano’s soundboard to swell – thus stretching the strings and shifting its tone high.
Tuning your piano regularly, on the other hand, ensures that it sounds vibrant and clear – that it really sings – throughout the year.
3) How often should I tune my piano?
Most piano manufacturers recommend that a piano be tuned 4 times in its first year and a minimum of 2 times a year subsequently, or once every 6 months.
Does that sound excessive to you? Well, to put things in perspective, consider that a concert piano is tuned before every performance, and a piano in a professional recording studio, where it is in constant use, is tuned three or four times each week as a matter of course.
On the other hand, though, a piano that is used largely as a furniture piece likely will not need tuning more than once a year.