In contrast, instruments such as the violin, trumpet, clarinet, or the human voice have flexible pitch. A skilled musician intuitively alters the pitch of each note as she plays — “tuning” it — so it sounds best with the rest of the music.
But why? Isn’t C always C, A always A? It turns out not. Let’s do a little experiment: Imagine you’re a violinist playing in a string quartet. When you all play a C major chord together, you each instinctively adjust your pitch so the chord sounds perfectly harmonious — clear and resonant, with no roughness. (Tuned in this way, intervals are called “pure.”) Now the music shifts to an Ab major chord and you’re still playing that same C note. You notice something: to sound harmonious in this new context, that C needs to be played at a slightly different pitch. Your fingers shift almost unconsciously.
Being “in tune” is fundamentally relational. A note can’t be in tune all by itself — only in relationship to the notes around it. Musical harmony isn’t a set of fixed numbers — it’s a web, constantly adjusting and alive.
But on a piano, we have to crystallize this fluid, living system into something fixed. Every note of the scale must be assigned a singular pitch. A C tuned on the piano to sound perfectly pure in a C major chord will sound noticeably out of tune when played in an Ab major chord — but we can’t retune it mid-performance like we can on a violin. It’s clear that we will have to make a compromise.
So how do we tune a piano with a fixed set of pitches that can still serve this fluid, relational harmonic web? This is where temperament comes in. Temperament is the choice about the exact pitch of each note — and which compromises to make, since all of our harmonies can’t be pure at the same time. It’s a question tuners have been exploring for centuries, with many different answers. But before we get to those solutions, let’s understand a little more deeply why this problem exists in the first place.
Consider leap years. We need them because an Earth year is 365.2422 days — not a neat number! Musical tuning has the same problem. If we tune each note to sound perfectly pure with the one before it, stepping around all twelve notes of the octave, we’d expect to land right back where we started. But we don’t. The circle doesn’t quite close — we’re slightly off, even though every step was perfect. So we have to make tiny adjustments to those perfect intervals. These adjusted intervals are called tempered intervals. Temperament is like that leap day: those small adjustments let the whole cycle line up.
Of course, with leap years we just add one day in one place. Musical temperament is more nuanced — we have to distribute tiny adjustments across all the intervals. And how we distribute them is where the art comes in.
There are two options: (1) unequal temperaments, where we spread the tempering of the intervals unevenly to create more pure harmony in certain keys and more tension in others (and there are many possible variations on this), or (2) equal temperament, where we spread the tempering uniformly across all the intervals, making every key sound exactly the same.
Unequal temperaments were the norm from the 14th century through the 19th century. Early versions distributed the tempering drastically — eight keys were nearly pure, while the remaining four were unusably harsh. Over time, refinements led to the so-called well temperaments, which made all keys usable while still preserving subtle differences in color and personality.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the practice of equal temperament emerged. In this system, every interval is tempered equally so that all the keys are identical — none very pure, but none very edgy either. This is the temperament used almost exclusively today. Equal temperament has some major advantages: it makes it possible to play freely in any key, compose modulating harmonies, and explore music across all tonalities without ever hitting a “sour” key. It’s a clever compromise that gives us maximum flexibility. Our modern ears have become thoroughly accustomed to this system, and the intervals in equal temperament are “in tune enough” for us to hear them as correct.
But equal temperament comes with sacrifices too. In well temperaments, as we mentioned, the keys with fewer sharps or flats (like C, G, D, F, and Bb major) have close to pure intervals, making these keys feel calm, stable, and peaceful — a quality lost in equal temperament. Similarly, the keys with more sharps and flats are more “colorful” than their equivalents in equal temperament. The German composer Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart published an essay in 1806 in which he described the characteristics of the keys. C major is described as “Completely pure. Its character is: innocence, simplicity, naïvety, children’s talk.” Db major, in contrast, is “A leering key, degenerating into grief and rapture. It cannot laugh, but it can smile; it cannot howl, but it can at least grimace its crying.” Composers of the 18th and 19th centuries chose keys carefully, utilizing each one’s emotional color to convey a specific emotional landscape. Modulating from one key to another was a journey. These effects are lost when we play music of these composers in modern equal temperament.
In recent decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in unequal temperaments, as well as the development of many new ones. These temperaments range from 18th-century-style well temperaments, with stark differences in character between keys, to versions that are nearly equal temperament but still preserve subtle color variations. And with modern computer technology, we can precisely design and tune unequal temperaments, shaping the character of each key, in ways that weren’t possible in previous times. A skilled tuner can tailor the temperament to bring out the best in each piano.
Understanding temperament is more than just a historical curiosity — it affects how a piano sounds and feels today. When you tune your piano, you have options: you can stick with standard equal temperament for maximum flexibility, or explore an unequal temperament to bring out the distinctive character of different keys. Your choice of temperament affects the personality of your instrument. Most piano owners have never been asked which they’d prefer — but it’s a real choice, and yours to make. By working together, we can decide what approach best fits your music and your ears, giving you a piano that’s not only in tune, but alive with the relationships between its notes.
]]>That’s the answer most piano manufacturers give, and it’s not wrong. But it’s a little like answering “how often should you water a plant?” with “once a week.” The real answer depends on your piano, your room, and your ears. And understanding why will tell you something genuinely interesting about what tuning actually is.
A piano has about 230 strings, each under enormous tension — roughly 160 to 200 pounds per string. Together, they pull against the piano’s cast iron plate with a combined force of around 20 tons. That enormous tension is what allows a piano to project its sound with such volume and power.
The problem is that tension isn’t stable. It’s responsive to its environment, always shifting in response to changes in humidity and temperature. Of the two, humidity is the main culprit. The piano’s soundboard — the large spruce panel that amplifies the strings’ vibration into the room — absorbs moisture in damp conditions, and releases it when the air is dry. As it does this, it swells and shrinks. The strings move with it, which changes their tension. And any change in tension means a change in pitch.
This is why a piano goes out of tune — regardless of how much it’s been played. It isn’t about wear and tear — it’s physics. The changing air around the piano is constantly nudging it away from where the tuner left it. A piano tuning is a bit like an ice sculpture; it very subtly starts to melt before it’s even finished.
Twice a year is a reasonable baseline, since it loosely tracks the two major seasonal humidity swings most climates experience. But the right answer varies considerably depending on your situation.
The single biggest factor is the climate of the room your piano lives in. In the Pacific Northwest, we’re fortunate to have relatively moderate seasonal swings compared to somewhere like the Midwest or the Northeast — but that doesn’t tell the whole story. What matters more is what’s happening inside your home: whether you’re running forced-air heat, how well your house holds humidity through the winter, whether the piano sits near a heating/cooling vent, an exterior wall, or a door. Two pianos in the same local area can have very different climate experiences. A piano in a humidity-controlled space will drift far less than one sitting next to a drafty window. Without control, twice a year may not be enough. With it, once a year often is.
One of the most effective things you can do, regardless of your local climate, is install a humidity control system directly in the piano. Systems like the Piano Life Saver mount inside the cabinet and work to keep the relative humidity around the soundboard steady year-round. A piano with one of these installed drifts far less between tunings. The wood and glue joints that hold the instrument together benefit too. It’s an investment that pays for itself in reduced tuning frequency, increased musical enjoyment, and the long-term health of the instrument.
New pianos are a special case. In the first two or three years of a piano’s life, the strings are still stretching and settling under tension. New pianos go out of tune faster and benefit from more frequent tuning — some manufacturers recommend three or four times in the first year. Each tuning helps the strings seat a little more, and over time the piano stabilizes.
Moving also disrupts a piano. Even a short move introduces jostling and, almost inevitably, a climate change. Always tune after a move, regardless of when it was last done.
There’s another variable that doesn’t get enough attention: musical tolerance. How much does it bother you when your piano isn’t perfectly in tune?
This varies enormously from person to person — and neither end of the spectrum is wrong. A professional musician or serious student might feel the drift within a few months and find it distracting. A casual player who sits down on Sunday afternoons might not notice until the piano is quite significantly out of tune. Some people even prefer a slightly out of tune piano! All of them have different valid answers to “how often should I tune my piano?”
It’s best to think of tuning as a service to your musical experience, not an obligation to the piano itself.
One exception worth noting: young students benefit immensely from a well-tuned instrument, since their ears are still developing a sense of pitch. They might not be able to tell you that the piano sounds off — they just quietly absorb whatever they’re hearing.
That said, there is a genuine argument for staying consistent — one that goes beyond the immediate pleasure of a well-pitched piano.
A piano tuned frequently throughout its lifetime tends to be more stable between tunings. The strings, tuning pins, and soundboard settle around the correct tension over time. In a sense, the piano becomes habituated to being in tune. When it drifts, it doesn’t go as far, and it comes back more easily. Consistent tuning is one of the better long-term investments you can make in the instrument.
Here’s something that surprises many piano owners: a piano that is tuned every six months but never otherwise serviced is not a well-maintained piano.
Tuning addresses pitch — the frequency at which each string vibrates. It does nothing for the mechanical action, the roughly ten thousand moving parts that translate the movement of your fingers into sound. That work belongs to regulation: the precise adjustment of the friction, alignment, and timing of all these moving parts. A well-regulated piano feels effortless; a piano severely out of regulation feels terrible to play even if it’s perfectly tuned.
Tuning also doesn’t address the tone of the instrument. The properties of the piano’s hammers — their shape, whether they are soft or hard, springy or not — determine whether the piano sounds bright or mellow, harsh and unpleasant, or sweet and pleasing. The process of manipulating the hammers to achieve better tone is called voicing. And again, a piano that is severely in need of voicing work will not be musically satisfying even if the tuning is perfect.
Think of tuning like keeping a car’s tires inflated: necessary, and something you’d definitely notice without, but not a replacement for maintaining the engine and suspension.
A good mechanic doesn’t just check the tires — and I try not to either. That’s why I always try to spend a bit of time on every visit attending to regulation, voicing, and any sticking keys or other minor repairs that might come up.
A piano that goes years without attention will almost always drop in pitch — sometimes dramatically. String tension gradually relaxes, and each cycle of seasonal humidity pushes it a little further flat. Eventually the piano can be a half step or more below A440, the international pitch standard.
Bringing a piano back from this state requires extra time and attention: what’s called a pitch raise or pitch correction. This involves two or even three passes of tuning to restore it to where it should be.
The reason for these extra steps has to do with the extreme tension of the piano strings that we already mentioned. A piano’s strings don’t act independently; they all bear down on the soundboard, which flexes slightly in response to their combined load. When you raise the tension on one section of strings, it shifts the balance of forces on the soundboard, which in turn changes the tension on every other string. From the tuner’s point of view: the strings you just tuned are no longer where you left them.
This is the circular difficulty at the heart of a pitch raise: you can’t do it in a single pass, because adjusting anything changes everything else. So you work in rounds — a rough raise first, then a full fine tuning, sometimes a third pass weeks later after things have had a chance to settle. It’s a process of converging on the target, not landing it in one shot.
This is why pitch raises take more time and may require a follow-up visit — it’s a process of patience, not a single fix.
So: how often should you tune your piano?
Twice a year is a good default — once in the spring as humidity rises, once in the fall as the heating season dries things out. More often if you’re a serious player, if your room climate is unstable, or if your piano is new. Less often is defensible if you have good humidity control and a tolerant ear — but once a year should really be the minimum. Beyond that, you risk drifting into pitch-raise territory, and with it the long-term instability that comes from strings and pins that have lost their footing.
If you’re not sure what schedule makes sense for your specific piano and room, I’m happy to chat and give you a straightforward recommendation. No two instruments — or homes — are quite alike.
]]>