How Often Should You Have Your Piano Tuned in Chicago

How Often Should You Have Your Piano Tuned in Chicago

Everyone knows that in order to have a nice sounding piano it needs to be tuned. However, not everyone knows how often should you have your piano tuned in Chicago where weather and humidity heavily fluctuate. 

Your First Piano Tuning

Whether you bought a new piano, inherited your grandmothers old piano or bought a piano from Craigslist, it will need to be tuned more often in the first year. You would think that a newer piano would hold its tune longer than an old one, however the opposite is actually true. New strings are very stiff and are more likely to contract back into their original shape once stretched out. This means it will often take several attempts to properly tune these strings. If you have an older piano that you just got and it likely hasn’t been tuned in a long time. You will need to get a pitch raise tuning to bring it up to pitch and then a fine tuning with a follow up tuning a couple months later. It’s not out of the norm for a piano to be tuned 3 or 4 times in the first year.

Long-Term Maintenance

After the first year of owning a piano things become a little easier. In Chicago most active piano players, churches and schools will have their piano tuned twice a year. While studios and piano teachers might have it tuned 4 times. This being said, the average family in Chicago probably only gets their piano tuned once a year in order to save some money.

Here at Chicago Piano Tuner I always recommend getting your piano tuned every 6 months in order to have a nice sounding and functioning piano. However, I do realize for many families it’s not a priority to have a really nice sounding piano and they would rather just have it done once a year and save the money. PLEASE PLEASE…. Try and have your piano tuned at least once a year. If you don’t your piano will always be playing catch up and never sound up to it’s potential.