How often should my piano be tuned?
The West is a good place to be an acoustic instrument, where changes in humidity and temperature, the main culprits behind an out-of-tune piano, are less extreme. The tropics can tear pianos apart, and swings of weather in the Eastern United States necessitate two or more tunings a year. Most pianos in our neck of the woods can be tuned once or twice annually and remain healthy.
Pianos played more frequently or vigorously—those belonging to professional musicians, recording studios, concert venues, or schools, will need more frequent tuning. Ultimately the decision is up to you, the player. Your piano will tell you when it wants to be tuned.
Beyond the tuning itself, a piano benefits from being checked in upon. Regular tuning means a technician has their eyes and ears open for common issues which may arise invisibly to the player. As with any instrument or machine, regular maintenance helps to prevent more serious issues.
How can I better preserve my piano's tuning?
If possible, locating your piano in a well-insulated room away from direct sunlight is the simplest way to increase the longevity of a tuning. An interior wall is best, which will undergo the least temperature change. Keeping distance from moisture sources—showers, dryer vents—is also wise.
Some piano owners take additional steps to regulate and monitor humidity. Humidity control systems, from the in-piano Dampp Chaser™ to whole-room or even whole-house systems, contribute to the stablest tunings and furthermore to pianos which will last generations. For those who revel in information, data-loggers can be installed in a piano which monitor and record humidity levels over time.
My piano hasn't been tuned in years. Will this make for a more expensive tuning?
In our part of the country, not necessarily. I've seen many pianos in the West go years between tunings and remain surprisingly stable. If a piano is especially out of tune, however, it will require a pitch correction. This is a quick pass proceeding the usual fine tuning. Without this first pass, the usual tuning would destabilize rapidly, usually during the tuning process itself. This additional time means a proportionally higher fee.
It is possible to tune a piano relative to it's especially-out-of-tune state, what's known as "floating pitch". If the instrument is only ever played by itself, it can remain, as a whole, flat or sharp, in tune with itself. That being said, modern pianos are designed to hold string tension at standard concert pitch. Furthermore, some evidence suggests a sense of pitch (including relative pitch, absolute pitch, or perfect pitch) can be a learned phenomenon resulting from exposure to music. This implies listening to an in-tune piano increases the accuracy of one’s sense of pitch. If it's within your means, especially if you plan to play your piano with other instruments, a pitch correction is best for pianos more than 10 cents (one tenth of the pitch between adjacent notes) out of tune.
Perfect quiet would be nice, but most tuners know it's exceedingly rare and have developed the ability to tune through the sounds of daily life. However, you'll endear yourself to a piano technician by minimizing unnecessary noise while they tune. Droning sounds, like leaf blowers or vacuum cleaners, are the most challenging to tune through. Avoiding these and similar noises during a tuning is a much-appreciated courtesy.
Do you need perfect quiet to tune?
No, I’m an aural tuner. I use a single tuning fork to establish A440, and from there extrapolate intervals throughout the piano by ear. In this I honor and maintain the methods of my primary teachers, Stephen Pryputniewicz and Emily Townsend.
Do you use an ETD, or tuning software?
All A's are not alike. 440Hz has been designated as the international standard pitch for A4—the A above middle C—since 1955. Typically, British and American orchestras tune to A440, though exceptions abound. The Boston Symphony Orchestra tunes to A441, the New York Philharmonic to A442. The majority of symphony orchestras in continental Europe, in Austria and Germany especially, tune to A443.
The 17th and 18th centuries in Europe saw a phenomenon known as "pitch inflation", where competing orchestras, looking for a brilliant sound to set themselves apart, tuned to sharper and sharper pitches. Taught and ready to snap, A reached 451Hz at La Scala in Milan. It was a coalition of strained opera singers which finally put its foot down, prompting the French government in 1859 to pass a law mandating A be tuned to 435Hz.
Many modern Baroque-focused ensembles tune to A415, approximately a semitone below standard concert pitch.