Pitch Raise

International standard pitch is 440 cycles per second for the A above Middle C. It is important that pianos are tuned to standard pitch so they can be played with other instruments. Imagine the dissonance of a piano, tuned at a non-standard pitch, playing along with a trumpet, or a clarinet, or a saxophone, which has been manufactured to sound at standard pitch! Cacophony! It is always my goal to tune every piano to standard pitch. In over fifty years of tuning thousands of pianos, I have been faced with perhaps two instruments incapable of supporting the tension of standard pitch.

In cases when pianos have not been tuned for some time, taking a piano back to standard pitch requires time and effort but is accomplished as a matter of course over and over on instruments old and new. Every piano deserves to be at standard pitch. No piano and certainly no piano owner or piano player should accept without a very good reason not putting the piano at standard pitch.

The process of bringing a piano up from a substandard pitch is not complicated. It simply requires multiple passes through the tuning process to increase the tension over the entire scale and allow the soundboard, bridges, and even the plate, to react to the tension increase and stabilize before a final tuning. It is impossible to have a successful tuning that increases tension with a single pass. There is some risk of string breakage during a pitch raise or subsequent tuning, but replacing a string or two is worth having a piano that is “in tune”. By definition, “tuning” means standard pitch!