Why Tune Your Piano On A Regular Schedule?

Why is it important to maintain a regular piano tuning schedule?

Sometimes, it can be a challenge to make the investment to maintain your piano with regular tunings – after all, you may not play it all that much. However, if you or others in your home play your piano often, the need to maintain your piano is becomes more obvious. Pianos look pretty sturdy and are well constructed. Each piano contains around 230 strings and thousands or parts, all of which contribute to producing the beautiful sound you like to hear. Here is why it is so important to keep your piano tuned.

Each highly elastic string is stretched to varying degrees of tension, somewhere between 150 and 200 pounds of pressure per string. When added up, the combined string tension can be upwards of 18 to 20 tons! That’s a ton of tension…well, make that nearly 20 tons! Given that they are made of stretch-able metal, are highly elastic, and are under great tension, these strings are very sensitive to things like temperature and humidity.

Strings can also move around, in terms of their pitch. Factors affecting this include humidity changes, temperature changes, seasonal changes, how often the piano is played, how firmly the piano is played, the fact that the strings are constantly under great tension (being pulled), and the overall quality of piano construction.

There is no such thing as a piano that stays perfectly in tune. The constant pulling, expansion, and contraction associated with each string changes the pitch of that string. Since strings rarely return to their exact starting point (or the point to which they were last tuned), they become out of tune with each other. Over time, this results in a piano that becomes quite noticeably out of tune.

Many people can not discern that their piano needs tuning, so they will wait until such time as they can hear just how bad their piano sounds. By this time, the piano can be in pretty bad shape.

Each time a piano is allowed to go significantly out of tune or drop in its pitch, it places a strain on the piano to bring it back up to the correct pitch. It also results in a piano that is not as stable, in terms of tuning results.

So, be sure to have your piano tuned on a regular basis, preferably every 6 months, but no less than once a year or so. Your piano will thank you for it!

[Schedule Tuning]

Questions about your piano? Contact Bill today!