When to Tune a Piano – How Often to Tune a Piano

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When a piano is in tune such as the glorious instrument in the accompanying video, you hear the beautiful tone, and you may wonder when to get your piano tuned. How do you know when it’s time to get your piano tuned. It’s not as easy a thing as you might think. So I’m going to liken it to a couple of different things. If any of you play guitar, you know that every time you take it out, you tune it up. In a perfect world, you would do the same thing with your piano! Since there are over 200 strings to tune, it’s not practical.

So there are certain guidelines much like with your car when you get the oil changed, you have an odometer reading, but there’s also a date. So even if you don’t drive your car, it’s still recommended you change the oil periodically. The same thing is true for your piano. Your piano might sound fine to you, but maybe it’s been a year or two since it’s been tuned. It’s very important to get it tuned because the whole piano could shift up or down and might sound good within itself but the instrument will not be able to hold the tuning without several more tunings to get the pitch stable again.

The Piano Technicians’ Guild recommends a piano ideally should be tuned about four times a year, a minimum of twice. Why is that? It’s very simple: the change of seasons affects the tuning of your piano. Even if you don’t play your piano, it’s got to be tuned a minimum of a couple of times a year and in most climates four times a year is close to ideal. If you play the piano a great deal, every time you play, it goes out a little bit – especially if you’re a strong player and practice a great deal. You might even consider monthly tunings of your piano. You might think this gets very expensive. But in the long run, like changing the oil in your car, the more you tune your piano, the better you preserve the instrument and the more stable the tuning becomes.

You never save money by putting off tuning. So here’s what I recommend for you. If you are a casual player and you’ve got a stable environment for your piano, put it on your calendar to get it tuned at least twice a year. If you’re tuning it just once a year, you’re going two steps forward and two steps backward because your piano over time will not be stable. If you do it twice a year, you might stay on that cusp and at least will not be going backward in the tuning stability. You and your piano will appreciate more tuning, and in the end, you will save money because your piano will become so stable that the tunings will hold longer for you. So that’s the long and short of it and thanks for joining us! info@livingpianos.com

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