Humidity swings

[D C AL CODA]

At 0907 PM 09/22/1998 -0400, you wrote

Hi,

>If my customers have the piano serviced yearly, then I tell
>them to have it tuned the same time each year.  Should pianos be tuned in the
>summer?

Here in California, I tend to use a concept I heard at some meeting a long
time ago.

It takes a few forms

"The basic rule of thumb (as I hold up my thumb) is that if the piano
sounds out or bad, then it needs to be tuned. No matter what time of year."

"If the piano sounds like it needs tuning, it needs to be tuned."

"If the piano sounds out of tune, it needs tuning."

"If the piano sounds bad, it needs tuning."

This gets around the question of when it should be tuned. Of course, most
piano owners don';t have their pianos tuned every time it sounds out, but
saying the above gets me around the question of when should the piano be
tuned.

I tell them that if the piano is tuned yearly, pick a date and have it
tuned at that time every year. It does not matter when

Also, I have seen literature that says the piano should be tuned four times
a year. I wish I could convince piano owners that this is true.-}

There is that great Dampp Chaser pamphlet, Relative Humidity & Piano Pitch,
that shows the graph of a few notes on a piano (on Puget Sound) and the
Relative Humidity when the pitch of those notes was measured, around the
entire year. The pitch and RH vary all over the place. 

In the text it says, "In terms  of 'how it sounds', if the piano had been
tuned in early June, it would have been pretty bad by October. Had the
piano been tuned in October, it would have sounded atrocious on Dec 22,
would have recovered dramatically (though unevenly) by the day after
Christmas, would have been even worse on February 16, and by March 1 would
have been ready for a good solid tuning."

Sound familiar?-}


Ken Hale, RPT
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