pitch-raiseThe international standard for tuning is A440, if the piano has not been tuned in a long time the pitch drops further each year. As it drops it becomes much harder to “pull the pins back to their proper tension level. The best analogy I can think of is an outside clothesline, tied off at each end, we hang the clothes up and over a period of time the clothsline starts to lose its tension and has to be pulled to get the tension back. The same is true of a piano. When a pitch raise is required we pull the strings back to their proper tension to stabilize the piano. Then we have to go back and retune the piano again to fine tune it. This does require an additional cost and time.