How To Easily Know For Certain That Your Piano Needs Tuned
First off, piano tuning is a job for professionals. This article will briefly discuss how to determine if your piano needs to be tuned. However, you should not attempt to tune the piano yourself. Piano strings are under tremendous tension. When they break, they are capable of inflicting serious, life-threatening injuries. Leave it to the professionals.
How do you know when your piano needs tuning?
Well, if your piano is old and or hasn't been played much recently, it probably needs to be tuned. The state of a properly tuned instrument is an unnatural one. Over time, air pressure changes and natural deterioration combined with tension cause all stringed instruments to lose their tune, which is simply the ability to produce a specific pitch when the required actions (playing) are performed.
To determine precisely if your piano needs tuning, use a smartphone tuning app to determine if the piano is playing the correct pitch. To do this, you must know what the pitch of the piano key your playing should be. This is in order to understand what your smartphone tuner is telling you. So, you need to play at least a little bit, even if it's another instrument besides the piano. Also, having some music theory knowledge will be really helpful as well, maybe more so than being able to play.
Just know that changing the strings and having them tuned is part of a complete piano restoration. And, many services that offer piano tunings also offer further assistance with complete restoration projects — tasks like refinishing the case, repairing dead keys, restoring pedal linkages, and replacing the felt on the hammers that strike the strings.
Using a Smartphone
The first step is downloading a tuning app to your phone. There are plenty of choices in most app stores. In general, look for an app that listens to what you play and then displays the pitch class (A through G) and the octave (a number) in which it's located.
Next, start with any note on your piano's keyboard — middle C is a good one. Play the note and see if the tuning app displays C4 on the screen.
If the tuning app indicates a pitch other than C4, or it indicates that the pitch fell between two half-steps, then that piano string is out of tune.
Repeat with all 88 keys.
For more information, contact a piano tuning service.
Share
