What's a pitch raise?

A piano has around 230 strings in it. Most notes you play, you're hearing three strings ringing!Maybe even more surprising, most of those strings are one piece of wire with their neighbor: the wire is wound around a tuning pin, runs down the piano, across the bridge (which transmits the string's vibrations to the soundboard), around a hitch pin, and back across the bridge and up the piano, to another tuning pin. Those two halves of the wire are tuned differently, under slightly different amounts of tension.

Over time, especially when the temperature and humidity change, that tension slips and the strings go flat.Here in coastal New England, Particularly

To bring a piano back up to pitch is to put more tension on the wire, but the two halves of the wire affect each other. And each of those strings pushes against the bridge and soundboard, which push back -- so changing each string's tension changes how the overall tension is spread through the piano.

Small changes to each string are manageable, but big changes ripple out in complicated ways.

In a standard piano tuning, we make only small changes.

When your piano has gone flat enough that it needs a big change to bring it back into tune, we need to do (at least) two tunings:

• First, the pitch raise: a rough tuning that gets each string under more tension, close to where it should be. Then we let the piano settle for a week or so.
• Second, now that we can tune the piano by making only small changes, we do the "real" tuning.

Does your piano need a pitch raise?

Use this tool to find out if your piano is out of pitch. It's safe and easy to use.

If it says your piano needs a pitch correction, let's talk! If you don't play with other musicians, and you don't play along with recordings, we might be able to tune your piano to itself, without bringing it up to pitch.