(Editor's Note: With this issue of The Melodeon, we begin a series that focuses on maintaining your piano. We're inagurating this series with a Q&A-styled article by Clint Taylor, one of Daynes Music's Steinway-trained technicians. Here's more about Clint. We're interested in your questions about your piano(s). Submit your own questions to our technicians here. Enjoy.)

Q: If I don't tune my piano regularly will I become an object of ridicule and disgust to my children and neighbors?

A: I can't speak for every case, but things would usually have to get pretty foul for anyone but your piano tuner to make much of a fuss.  That being said, there are some very good reasons for tuning your piano regularly.

First of all we have to understand a few things about piano strings themselves.  Piano wire, as we call it, is made from extremely hard steel.  This means that while it can be bent and stretched like all wire, it strongly resists any change in shape.  If this were not the case, piano strings, which go through several bends and are stretched to an extremely high level of tension, would not hold their tuning for very long at all.

I like to use the phrase "physical memory" to describe the way in which a piano string gets used to staying in a certain shape.  This allows the strings to hold their tuning despite the many subtle changes in shape that the piano undergoes on a daily basis as a result of fluctuations in temperature and humidity.  The more often a piano is tuned, the more likely the strings are to remember where they need to be.  On the other hand, if your piano grows accustomed to being out of tune, it will be much harder to tune it and to get the tuning to stick.

One analogy to consider as the temperature outside is falling, is that of your household furnace.  Under ordinary circumstances, your heater comes on every time the temperature falls below a specified level.  This happens often enough that members of the household generally do not even notice that the temperature has dropped.  If, on the other hand, the heater only came on after the temperature had dropped 20° or so, your kids might start to complain a little.  In addition, once the furnace had managed to heat the house back up to a comfortable level, the temperature would drop again quite quickly because the walls, floor and furniture would still be cold and act like ice cubes in a glass of water.  However if the thermostat is working normally, all the items in the house begin to soak up the warmth and act as regulators that prevent rapid fluctuations in temperature.

In other words, though an ideal piano schedule will depend greatly on the use that the instrument receives, once your piano has gotten used to being in tune it should not sound particularly sour by the time your tuner returns in 6 months to a year or whenever you choose.  However, if you let the tuning go for several years, you may as well get used to your piano being slightly out of tune.  It may sound fine right after the tuning, but without some extra effort on behalf of your tuner and perhaps a follow-up visit, the strings will tend to return to their previous state.

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