It is one of the more awkward phone calls in piano care. A family finally books the tuning they have been meaning to schedule since the pandemic, and the technician, after a look at the instrument, explains that it needs something more than a tuning, at a higher price than the number on the website. Nobody is being upsold. The piano has crossed a line that is worth understanding, because the physics behind it also explains how to never cross it again.
What is the difference between a tuning and a pitch raise?
A tuning is fine adjustment. The piano is already close to concert pitch, and the technician refines each string until every interval locks in. A pitch raise is course correction: the whole instrument has sagged well below pitch, and the overall tension of the entire string band has to be rebuilt before any fine tuning can hold. One is trimming a hedge. The other is bringing back an overgrown garden, and it cannot be done with a single pass of the shears.
How far does a piano drop in five years?
Further than most owners expect. A piano loses pitch continuously: new and old strings alike stretch under load, and every swing of household humidity works the soundboard, with each cycle leaving the pitch a little lower than the one before. Skip a year and the drift is audible to a musician. Skip five, and the piano is typically a substantial fraction of a semitone flat, sometimes more if it has stood near a window, a heater vent, or in an uninsulated room. It still sounds like a piano. It has simply become a piano in its own private key, slowly sinking away from every other instrument, recording, and ear-training app on earth.
Why can’t one tuning pass fix it?
Because of the sheer load involved. A piano carries over two hundred strings, each pulled to something like a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds, for a combined tension in the range of sixteen to twenty tons across the plate and soundboard. When a technician raises a very flat piano, they are adding a meaningful amount of new load to that structure, and the structure answers back. As tension climbs, the soundboard compresses under the added pressure, and the strings tuned at the start of the pass sag flat again before the last strings are even finished. Tune a badly flat piano once, perfectly, and it will be out of tune before the technician reaches the freeway.
So the work is done in stages. The first pass is deliberately rough and deliberately sharp, pulling each string slightly past the target because the technician knows it will settle back as the load equalizes. Once the whole instrument is bearing something close to its proper tension, the fine tuning follows, usually in the same visit. After a large raise, a follow-up tuning a few weeks later is often part of the prescription, because a piano that has just taken on that much tension keeps settling for a while.
Why does it cost more, and is it worth it?
It costs more because it is genuinely two tunings’ worth of work in one appointment, and the honest answer to whether it is worth it is that it is the only path back. There is no discount route to concert pitch. What softens the math is the comparison nobody makes: the pitch raise still costs less than the years of skipped tunings would have, and once it is done, ordinary tunings hold again. Fair warning, offered in advance so it never feels like an excuse: the first tuning after a big raise will not hold as long as you are used to. Stability returns over a couple of cycles as the instrument relearns its tension, and then the piano behaves like a maintained piano again.
How do you never pay for one again?
By never letting the drift build. A piano on a recurring schedule never wanders far enough from pitch to need rescuing, which means every visit is a normal tuning at a normal price, and the instrument spends its whole life sounding the way it should. We keep track of the schedule so you do not have to. When you request service, a real person reads your note and connects you with one of the regional technicians serving the SF Bay Area, and if it has been five years, no judgment. That is most of our favorite phone calls, because the before and after is glorious.