More on Pitch Raising If a piano has not been tuned for a number of years (5 or more), and has never been on a regular (at least yearly) tuning schedule, or you have had trouble keeping it in tune, or you just bought it (used) and have no idea about its history, then the chances are good that you will need a Pitch Raise What's a Pitch Raise? Hard, Cruel Facts: The more you do to a piano, tuning-wise, the sooner it will go out of tune again. Past a certain point of out-of-tuneness, trying to get a precise tuning all at once is a waste of your money and my time. A piano reacts to tuning in two ways: Short-term and Long-term. So clever technicians invented the Pitch Raise. The idea is to add a lot of change to the piano in a hurry, before it has chance to get into its Long-term reaction. Precision is not an issue, but the skillful part is guessing what the Long-term reaction is going to look like and managing the Pitch Raise so that a month later, when the piano is finished with the Long-term reaction, it will have landed fairly close to in-tune. At that point, the piano is a candidate for a Regular Tuning, which whould then last approximately six months.

Patrick Callanan Registered Member, Piano Technicians Guild 2468 Freetown Dr. Reston, VA 20191 703-620-8906