Basics of Piano Care | Piano Rebuilding Hudson Valley

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I’d like to start by talking about basic piano care… The aspect of piano care that everyone is familiar with is tuning. Pianos go out of tune due to changes in humidity, which swells and shrinks the wood of the soundboard, bridges, and action parts. This happens regardless of how much or how little the piano is played. We STRONGLY recommend having your piano tuned twice a year. This is in line with all manufacturer’s recommendations. If you put it in terms of car maintenance (the other big, complicated machine in your life), tunings are the oil changes of piano care. It’s important to note that your piano may be out of tune and still sound relatively ok, but not be at the correct pitch. More on this in a future post. Is your piano out of tune? Find out how to determine this here.

A piano is a very complex instrument, with up to 10,000 parts - many of which move and are subject to wear over time. This causes the piano to function at a sub-optimal level, lessening your enjoyment and making playing and learning more difficult. The good news is this is a relatively easy condition to combat. Every 3 years or so, the action should be serviced. To do this, we remove the action, clean it with compressed air, lubricate all action centers, and tighten all screws (over 200 in uprights!). This serves three purposes: it makes the piano play better, avoids problems due to contaminant buildup, and allows for the detection of small issues before they become big ones. If it were a car, this would be the inspection and basic tune up.

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Piano Tuning And Repair Service Hudson Valley , Piano Tuning And Repair Service Upstate New York , Grand Piano Regulation , Piano Tuner Upstate New York

Piano Tuning | Piano Tuning And Repair Service

Tuning a piano is the process of adjusting the tension of its strings, thereby altering their pitch, or frequency of vibration, by slightly turning the tuning pins to which they’re attached, so that each string sounds pleasingly in harmony with every other string. This harmony is achieved by tuning the piano according to certain known acoustical laws and aesthetic rules and customs.

How Is a Piano Tuned? Is It Difficult?

To the uninitiated, tuning a piano may seem a simple, straightforward procedure, but it isn’t. The process is complicated by the sheer number of strings and tuning pins (more than 200 of each, the exact number varying with the model), by the high tension under which the strings are stretched, by the tightness with which the tuning pins are anchored in the pinblock, and by the friction points over which the taut strings must slide as they’re being tuned. All of these factors are obstacles not only to tuning, but also to creating a tuning that will be stable for a reasonable length of time, given the piano’s use and environment.

Tuning is also made more difficult by the design element of modern pianos known as loop stringing. In loop stringing, each length of steel music wire in the treble actually forms two strings, which are separated by a sharp bend in the wire where the strings are anchored to the piano’s cast-iron frame. Sometimes these two strings sound the same note and are tuned to the same pitch. Other times, they are parts of adjacent notes, with one half of the wire tuned a half step higher or lower than the other half, the two halves necessarily held at distinctly different tensions. Because all parts of a single wire have a tendency to seek the same tension, loop stringing is a more challenging environment in which to learn how to create a stable tuning.

In addition to physical obstacles, there are acoustical obstacles to tuning. A paradox common to all fixed-pitch instruments, first discovered by the ancient Greeks, is that it’s impossible for all the intervals — thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, etc. — within a perfect octave to themselves be perfect. This problem is dealt with by slightly expanding or contracting — tempering — each of these intervals so that, together, they will add up to a perfect octave. The tuner creates a temperament — a single octave of 13 notes at the center of the keyboard in which every note is tuned in its correctly tempered relationships to all other notes in that octave — and then copies those relationships to all remaining sections of the keyboard by tuning each note to be a perfect octave (or octaves) above or below the corresponding note in the temperament octave.

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Humidity Control for your Piano | Piano Humidity Control

Many people are not aware that humidity can have a profound effect on the tuning and performance of your piano. Humidity is a measure of how much water vapor is in the air, relative to the maximum amount of water vapor it can hold (that’s why it’s called relative humidity!).  Your piano is subject to wide swings in humidity. This is particularly true in the Hudson Valley, where the majority of our clients live. In the summer, humidity levels can go as high as 100%, while in the winter, your heating system can drop the relative humidity in your home into the single digits.

What does this mean for your piano? When the humidity is high, the soundboard and bridges absorb moisture and swell, increasing the tension of the strings and forcing the piano sharp. When the humidity is low, the opposite happens - the soundboard and bridges release moisture and shrink, reducing the downward pressure of the strings and forcing the piano flat. This is why almost all piano manufacturers - and your piano technician - recommend that your piano is tuned twice a year. In addition to forcing your piano out of tune, increased humidity affects the action parts, swelling the wood and increasing friction, which can make your action respond sluggishly (a major cause of “sticking” keys).

How can you mitigate the effects of humidity on your piano? There are several options. The absolute best solution is to have your whole house humidity controlled. This involves either attaching a humidifier to your HVAC system or installing a separate humidifier/dehumidifier system in your home. While this is the best solution, it can be very expensive to install and maintain, and is usually cost prohibitive.

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Tuning $175 | Piano Tuning And Repair Service

A standard tuning is for those pianos that have been tuned in the past 6 months to a year. It involves manipulating the tuning pins to bring all 230 strings to their proper and harmonious pitch. We use a combination of aural and electronic tuning to ensure your piano sounds great! We also tighten the plate bolts, check for problems, and tighten the bench.

If we haven’t seen your piano in a while, it may need one or more Pitch Adjustments to bring the strings up to a tension where fine tuning is possible without stressing the piano.

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How does the humidity level affect my piano's tuning?

 The swelling and shrinking of the piano's soundboard is the most immediate and noticeable effect of humidity change. The soundboard, a sheet of wood approximately 3/8” thick, is made with a slightly crowned shape. The strings pass over the soundboard and are connected to it by a wooden piece called a bridge. The upward crown of the soundboard presses the bridge tightly against the strings.

As the moisture level in the soundboard increases during periods of high relative humidity, the crown expands and pushes the bridge harder against the strings. The strings are stretched tighter and the piano's pitch rises. Because this increase in crown is greater in the center of the soundboard than at the edges, the pitch rises more in the middle octaves than in the bass or treble registers. 

Relative humidity (RH) is the amount of moisture contained in the air, compared to the maximum amount of moisture that the air is capable of holding. During periods of low relative humidity the soundboard shrinks, reducing the crown and decreasing pressure against the strings. The pitch drops, again with the greatest effect noticeable in the center of the keyboard. When relative humidity returns to its previous level, the average pitch of all the strings will return to normal, although the exact pitch of individual strings will be slightly changed from their original settings. Thus, a piano only will stay in tune as long as the relative humidity level in the air surrounding the soundboard remains constant. Extreme humidity changes require making greater changes in string tension to bring the piano into tune. This upsets the equilibrium between the string tension and the piano frame, and the piano never becomes stable.

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