Piano Care And Maintenance

A piano can have up to 12,000 parts and many of those parts are moving parts. If you want your piano to stay in good working order, it needs a little tender loving care now and then.

Your first year of piano ownership will require the most maintenance (it's kind of the opposite of owning a car). You'll want to get it serviced two to four times that year. After that, talk to your piano technician to see how often it needs to be serviced. Serving includes tuning, regulating, voicing, and repairing or replacing worn out parts.

Tuning is the part that just about any piano owner is familiar with and many know how bad an out of tune piano sounds. Each piano has over 200 strings so it can be a bit of a process to make sure each is in pitch, but the sound quality improvement you get is immense.

How does a piano go out of tune in the first place? The most common cause is humidity changes. It's recommended that you don't get your piano tuned right after the humidity has changed or the tune will only hold a couple months.

When a piano is regulated, that means that mechanical parts of the piano are being worked on. There are no hard and fast rules to how often a piano needs to be regulated as it depends largely on the climate its being kept in.

Voicing a piano is an adjustment of the tone of your piano. As you use your piano, hammers wear and compact and some notes will become too harsh. At this point, your piano needs to be voiced. Most people find that their piano needs to be voiced every 1-5 years, depending on how much use your piano receives.

Of course there's more to piano care than just the inner guts of the piano. There's an exterior of your piano and it requires a bit of care too. Most people can handle keeping their piano clean, but one thing to remember is that using furniture polish on a good piano is a big no no.

Reconditioning a piano typically doesn't need to be done very often, but once in a while your piano technician may tell you that the time has come to get the piano reconditioned and certain parts will need to be replaced.

The step beyond reconditioning is rebuilding. This is a very labor intensive process and also quite expensive, but caring for your piano can help you avoid the expense of a full rebuild.

Keep in mind that a piano is an investment, and that a well maintained piano can actually increase in value over its life.

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Gray Rollins is a featured writer for PianosCentral - a site that helps people learn how to play the piano. Come check out Rocket Piano review and the Pure Pitch Method at his site.

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