How To Maintain Your Piano
Tuning is the most common maintenance you will do for your piano and will be done the most often. Regulation is adjusting the action for optimal playability so that every note has the same feel. Voicing is adjusting the tone so it sounds evenly across the keyboard.
Piano Tuning
Tuning is the adjustment of tension of every string so that it vibrates at the correct pitch. There is close to 250 tuning pins and there are many things that can affect the pitch of a piano. This includes temperature and humidity levels, how hard the piano is played and the age and the condition of the piano.
New pianos require more tunings in the first year because the wire is still stretching. It is good to not let the piano fall in pitch at this time and keep the tension of the wire where it needs to be. It will also be more stable in the long run to not let the tension of the wire fall to low. I run across pianos all the time that haven’t been tuned for years and it puts more stress on the instrument to bring it back to pitch. String breakage can happen and that runs into more cost for the customer.
Regulation
Regulation will need to be done to a piano once in a while to improve the feel. This involves adjusting the actions parts so that every note feels the same and is consistent across the keyboard. Being able to play loud and soft is important to the dynamics of the music being played. How often a piano needs regulations will depend on how often the piano is used and it’s age. Once every five years is a good guess for when a piano needs regulation. If it is used by students in an institution you might want to do this every year because it is being used more often.
Voicing
Voicing is the adjustment of tone so that it is even and gives every piano its own unique sound. The room can affect the sound of the piano. Some pianos are too bright on hard wood floors and need to be softened up a bit. This is done by working with the hammers so they are not hard as rocks and the hammers need to be aligned with the string so that they hit squarely.
Daryl Durand Piano Service
(816) 587-9970
Piano Tuning and Repair
Kansas City Piano Tuner
Daryl Durand is a Registered Piano Technician servicing the Greater Kansas City Area since 1980. Quality professional service in piano tuning, action regulation, voicing, piano cleaning, on site repairs and Damp Chaser Humidity Systems installation. Daryl has been a member of The Piano Technicians Guild since 1993 and a registered technician since 1998.
A Registered Piano Technician (RPT) is a member of the Piano Technicians Guild who has demonstrated competence by passing a series of three rigorous examinations on the maintenance, repair and tuning of pianos.
