Piano Pitch Raising
What is piano pitch raising?
You may have heard of piano pitch raising. But, what is it exactly and why may your piano need it?
To explain, your piano is designed to sound its best when tuned to A-440. This is known as concert pitch, and means that your piano will match the pitch of other instruments.
However, if a piano technician hasn’t tuned your piano for a long time, every year that passes, the pitch drops further and further away from its original level. Therefore, it’s harder to carry out the big adjustment that your piano requires all in one go. Why? Because there’s a risk of damage.
For effective pitch raising, this is what we need to do. Firstly, to re-align the strings to their original tension and tone, we have to raise all strings (approximately 220 of them) to their correct average tension levels. Then, we can follow this with a more accurate tuning., known as fine tuning.
Thus, this process is called pitch raising.
We advise regular tuning
After piano pitch raising, we’d strongly advice that you ask us to re-tune your piano after 3-4 months.
After the pitch raise and fine tuning, the tension levels will be more stable, and will remain so. In all likelihood, you’ll need to get the piano tuned again multiple times over the course of the next year or two, just to get it to stabilize and hold its tuning.
To put you in the picture, changes in temperature (hot or cold), humidity, and atmosphere, or moving the piano are the main reasons for pitch change.
To alleviate future problems, regular tunings once or twice a year will reduce the need for pitch raising in the future. As you can see, there’s some pretty substantial remedial work that we will need to do, but afterwards the pitch should remain relatively steady. And, you can adopt a more standard tuning and servicing schedule.
*we can carry out a pitch raise can only after we have carried out an inspection visit to see if the piano’s structural parts (frame, tuning pins and strings) can handle the increased tension.
35 years' experience
Dinh Ngo has over 35 years experience in piano tuning, servicing and repair '
Member of the PTA
Dinh Ngo is a member of the prestigious Pianoforte Tuners' Association
Highly Skilled
Dinh Ngo, B.Mus. Music Theory, Music Composition and Conducting (Conservatory of Saigon City, Viet Nam)
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