Frequently Asked Piano Questions

How often should I have my piano tuned?

We usually recommend tuning a piano once a year.

Some pianos go out of tune sooner than others, and they do need to be tuned twice a year.

Piano stores and manufacturers typically recommend tuning every six months, because that’s how long most pianos can hold a tuning.  If a piano goes more than a year without tuning, the pitch may drop too much.

Regular tunings keep the pitch at the concert standard of A=440, and they maintain tuning stability. Otherwise, the overall pitch keeps dropping lower.

Pianos typically go out of tune the most when heaters are turned on in the fall and off in the spring, and when there are dramatic humidity changes.

All of the pianos strings are attached to the wooden soundboard, and humidity changes make the board shrink or expand. When the board expands, it stretches the strings and makes them go sharp. When the board shrinks, the strings relax and go flat. However, each string goes flat at a different rate, causing the piano to sound out of tune. Also, the action of the hammers hitting the strings throws them out of tune.

Average indoor winter humidity is around 30%, spring humidity is around 50%, and summer humidity is around 70%.  These seasonal changes are why some of our clients have their pianos tuned every four months.

Piano Price Point has an interesting article on tuning frequency:

Yes, please avoid these pianos:

1] A piano with action problems.

Don’t take on a piano that has repair issues with the keys you will be playing, such as sluggish and sticking keys! This means that the piano has not been maintained and played on a regular basis. The problem is probably not fixable, and action issues like this are always likely to get worse and will appear on other keys. Some repair parts for a particular piano may not be available at all. Also, the repair cost could be very high, more than the value of the piano. You want a piano that has been maintained, with all the keys working properly. The only exceptions are the bottom five notes and top five notes, which you may never use. They typically seize up from prolonged lack of use.

2] A piano that is old and may be near the end of its useful life.

You don’t want an old piano if you can help it, because piano actions wear out and can get very noisy. Strings wear out too: if the bass notes sound thumpy and don’t produce a clear tone, walk away. It’s expensive to replace the bass strings, typically $500. You want as recent a vintage as you can find.

3] A piano that hasn’t been tuned in many decades.

That means the pitch has probably dropped dramatically below A-440. Bringing it back up to the standard of A-440 may break a lot of strings, and so it will need to be tuned at its current pitch. If the placement of the pitch is of importance to you, it’s a very good idea to check the pitch with a portable electronic tuner.

Every piano is unique in its sound and action touch. Try out pianos until you find one you are really happy with. If you can’t decide between two pianos, go with the newer one.

What can I do to maintain my piano?

The lowest and highest five keys don’t get played very much, so try to play those notes on a regular basis. Lack of playing makes piano actions degrade over time and is the main cause of sticking keys. Have it tuned once or twice a year, and play the entire keyboard on a regular basis to keep the action parts working smoothly.

How can I clean my piano exterior?

Most pianos just need light dusting.  The finish is soft and scratches easily, so use caution.

To remove stains, use a soft flannel cloth just slightly dampened with water, followed immediately with a dry flannel cloth to pick up any residual moisture.  Soft flannel cloth is the best material to use because the surface has been combed to raise soft fibers.  Other fabrics have exposed weaves, which are abrasive on the soft finishes of pianos and automobiles. Always wipe lightly, and always in straight lines following the wood grain. Never wipe with a circular motion, because circular swirl marks will appear.  This phenomenon is obvious on many cars.

A thin application of a high-quality carnauba wax is safe for most piano finishes.  Carnauba waxes need to be lightly buffed with soft flannel immediately, before the wax dries. Therefore, just do a small section at a time, in straight lines.  Never use cleaning products that contain water or other fluids, because they will penetrate to the wood and disrupt the finish over time.  Never use old t-shirts because the weave is abrasive and will leave swirl marks or scratches.

How can I clean my piano interior?

Piano soundboard sweepers are available online.  Be sure to wrap it with soft flannel cloth.

Please contact us for professional piano cleaning services.

What are False Beats?

Old piano strings degrade over time, becoming brittle with an altered tone. When you pluck a piano string, it makes sound by vibrating side-to-side. It also has waves or pulses of vibration that travel from one end of the string to the other end, and back again. These end-to-end vibrations are more noticeable in old strings, and they are called False Beats.

When two waves of false beats meet while traveling along the string, that phenomena is known as Wave Interference. It interferes with the sound of a string, and it interferes with piano tuning meters. It also makes unison strings sound different from each other within the same note.

If your piano has a poor tonal quality, that is probably the main reason. There are two types of Wave Interference: Constructive Interference, which increases the sound volume, and Destructive Interference, which causes a decrease in the sound volume or total silence.

We recently tuned a two-string note on a 1910 upright piano, and the false beats in the two strings interacted in a way that caused the perfectly tuned note to go in and out of total silence repeatedly when you played it. Amazingly, the sound waves were totally cancelling each other out.

What’s a Pitch Raise?

It’s a preliminary tuning of the entire keyboard to bring strings to their correct tension levels in a piano that is very out of tune or needs to be brought up to concert pitch. This ensures that the second and final tuning will be stable.

What is Inharmonicity, and How Does Stretch Tuning Compensate For It?

An ideal piano string would produce upper harmonics (or overtones) of the main note that are all in tune with that main note. However, real piano strings are very thick and stiff. This makes the upper harmonics sharper than theory would predict. This is called Inharmonicity.

We perceive the sharp upper harmonics as the actual pitch of the note. Therefore, a piano must be tuned to those sharp harmonics.

This would be fine, except that inharmonicity varies across the entire keyboard.

Since the shorter piano strings usually have higher inharmonicity as one goes up in pitch, we stretch the tuning sharp as we go up to compensate for this.

If one were to tune a piano without stretching the octaves, the harmonics of the low bass notes would clash noticeably with the harmonics of higher keys. To make the thick low bass strings sound in tune with the very high treble notes, the whole piano tuning must be stretched by making the octaves slightly wider than pure. This means that the notes above the starting pitch (F-3) will all be a slight but precise amount sharp, and the notes lower than the starting pitch will be slightly flatter. This is called a Stretched Tuning.

O.L. Railsback performed detailed experiments on stretch tuning in 1938, and published the Railsback Curve graph:

You can also see the graph with more information at this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_acoustics#The_Railsback_curve

Top of the line electronic piano tuning devices, such as the Sanderson AccuTuner, can analyze the inharmonicity of individual piano strings to mathematically calculate an ideal stretch tuning.

The effect is to bring out a beautiful, unified voice from the instrument.

Why Are Pianos Tuned in Equal Temperament?

We tune pianos in Equal Temperament so that the chords in every single key will always be in tune everywhere on the keyboard.

The term Temperament refers to any method used to tune pianos: we ‘temper’, or adjust, the interval between each note in a scale to make them sound evenly spaced.

Before Equal Temperament, pianos tuned to older temperaments would be in tune in some chords or key signatures, but would be out of tune in other chords or key signatures.

Equal Temperament was developed by mathematicians simultaneously in China and Europe in the 1500′s to solve this tuning problem posed by fixed-pitch instruments with a 12-note scale, like the piano. All the tuning methods up to that point always had a single “wolf note” that would be so out of tune, it was said to howl like a wolf.

The mathematical formula for Equal Temperament achieves the goal of dividing each octave into twelve equal notes:

Each note, or ‘interval’, is the twelfth root of two (approximately 1.0594630943592953) times the frequency of the previous interval.

This means that all of the notes in the scale are equally out of tune with so-called ‘perfect’ tuning, but they are all equally out of tune, so the overall effect is consonant.

The end result is that in Equal Temperament, all chords that are thirds are ever so slightly sharp, and all chords that are fifths are ever so slightly flat.

What? Yes! But the entire piano sounds perfectly in tune with itself, which is the ultimate goal in piano tuning and playing.

The development of Equal Temperament enabled composers to vary the key within one piece of music, taking advantage of the fact that the new temperament made it possible for the piano to sound in tune in all key signatures.

Bach’s title, ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’, suggests that he had written the music for a 12-note tuning system in which all keys sounded in tune.