Piano Tuner Wilmington DE Continues Explanation for Need of Regular Piano Tuning

As your Piano Tuner Wilmington DE , I often find that piano owners are not aware of the importance of regular piano tuning.  Our last blog post began an explanation that may help with understanding this issue.

There are two major reasons to tune a piano regularly:

To benefit the player

To benefit the piano, so it will last longer

Our previous article discussed the importance to the player, and this post will begin the discussion as to why your piano will last longer if it is maintained properly.

There are two main structures of the piano that will have problems if piano maintenance is overlooked. They are the strings, and the soundboard.

Regarding the piano strings, letting them go out of tune does not do much damage to them. The problem arises when they are finally returned to their proper pitches. When a piano is tuned regularly, the overall tension is not changed very much at each tuning, so there is little stress to the strings. If a piano is not tuned regularly, the pitch drops significantly on the strings, so that they will later need to be brought back up to the proper tension. When the tension is increased on the strings, the whole instrument flexes. As a result, for every amount the pitch is raised on a string, the pitch changes back 10-35% over the next ten minutes. The normal tension on a properly tuned string is 70% of the breaking tension. Strings are designed to be at that tension, so that the volume of the instrument will be as great as possible.

Consider, then, that a tuner is attempting to raise the pitch of a string to 70% of its breaking tension, and the string needs to be over-pulled by 35%. Even if the piano string does not break at that time, the high tension will contribute to metal fatigue, so the string is more likely to break in the future.

It sounds serious, but it is even worse than that, due to another design feature. We will discuss that feature in our next blog post.

If you have any questions about pianos, please ask us. We are your Wilmington DE piano tuner. Besides providing DE piano tuning and other piano services, we serve the Philadelphia, Eastern Shore MD and Southern NJ areas.