Top Ten Most-Asked Piano Questions - #10: Why does a piano go out of tune? Picture a clothesline strung across a backyard, from your house to a post in the yard. Now imagine over 200 of your neighbours yards, with similar clotheslines. This, on a very large scale, is what the inside of your piano looks like, except for the underwear flapping in the breeze (on the clotheslines, not in your piano). The clotheslines are the 200 or more steel strings inside, and the ground in which each of the posts is anchored is the soundboard, a half-inch-thick slab of solid spruce that resonates and amplifies the sound produced as the strings are struck by hard felt hammers. (Less expensive pianos often use laminates of spruce or various mystery-woods.) As summer and winter pass and humidity levels rise and fall, the wooden soundboard (the ground of the back yards) swells or shrinks, rising and falling with each season, so the tension on the clotheslines changes accordingly. Also, the striking of wood-and-felt hammers on the piano strings is somewhat analogous to the neighbour kids swinging on the clotheslines, which of course tends to loosen the strings. But even if the strings are never played, the passing of 6 to 12 months and the up-and-down of seasonal humidity changes - not to mention the constant strain of about 110 pounds of tension on each string - will rock the tuning of the piano somewhat. The posts standing in those 200 yards represent the tuning pins that I manipulate to change the tension - usually raising it back up - and bring the instrument into tune.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 15:27:36 +0000
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