Piano care
Why Nebraska weather puts your piano out of tune
It is almost never the playing. It is the air, and around here the air does something fairly extreme twice a year.
The short version
A piano’s soundboard is a large, thin panel of solid spruce, built with a slight curve called crown, under roughly twenty tons of string tension. Wood takes on moisture from humid air and gives it up to dry air, and as it does the panel swells and shrinks. The crown rises and falls with it. The strings sitting across the bridges go tighter and slacker as it moves.
That is the whole mechanism. Humidity moves the soundboard, the soundboard moves the strings, and the tuning goes with it. Playing a piano wears out its hammers and its action; weather is what puts it out of tune.
Which is why an untouched piano still drifts. People often tell me the piano in the spare room cannot possibly need tuning because nobody has played it in two years. That piano needs tuning more than the one being played daily in a stable room.
What makes Omaha harder than most places
Plenty of the country has mild, fairly steady indoor humidity. We do not. Eastern Nebraska runs a genuinely continental climate: cold, dry winters and hot, humid summers. What matters to your piano is the indoor figure, and indoors the swing gets amplified rather than smoothed out.
In January a forced-air furnace runs for months and drives indoor relative humidity down hard, frequently into the teens or twenties, which is drier than a lot of desert air. In July the same house sits warm and humid, and unless the air conditioning is running steadily the indoor figure climbs well up into the sixties.
A piano wants somewhere around 42% relative humidity, held steady. Steady is the operative word: it is the size and speed of the swing that does the damage, not any particular number. A Nebraska piano can be asked to travel most of the usable range twice a year, every year.
What that does over time
- Tunings do not hold. The most common complaint, and usually the first sign.
- Seasonal pitch drift. Pianos here tend to go sharp in the humid months and flat in the dry ones, often noticeably in the middle of the keyboard while the extremes stay put, which is why a piano can sound oddly out of tune with itself.
- Sticking keys. Humid weather swells the wooden parts of the action, and suddenly a few notes are sluggish. They usually free up on their own when the air dries out.
- Tuning pins that stop holding. Years of swelling and shrinking loosens the pinblock’s grip. This one is expensive and not really reversible.
- Soundboard cracks and loose ribs. The serious end of it. A crack does not automatically ruin a piano, but it is the sound of the instrument telling you the last twenty years were rough.
What actually helps, cheapest first
1. Move the piano
Free, and more effective than most people expect. Get it onto an interior wall, away from heating and cooling vents, out of direct sunlight, and away from fireplaces and exterior doors. Every one of those is a source of fast local swings in temperature and moisture. If your piano currently sits under a window on an outside wall, moving it is the single best thing you can do for it, and it costs nothing.
2. Deal with the room
A cheap hygrometer will tell you what you are actually dealing with, and it is worth knowing rather than guessing. If the room is dry in winter, a decent room humidifier fixes it for a fraction of what any piano-specific system costs, and it is better for you and for the rest of the woodwork in the house. If the house is humid in summer, running the air conditioning consistently generally does the job.
For a great many pianos in this area, that is the end of the conversation. A well-placed piano in a room with reasonable humidity control will hold a tuning perfectly well.
3. An in-piano climate system, if it is genuinely warranted
Systems such as the Dampp-Chaser sit inside the instrument and manage the humidity immediately around the soundboard. I hold the manufacturer’s installer certification, so I can fit one. But I will be straight with you: it has been a long time since I installed one, and it is not usually my first recommendation.
They work. They also need refilling, need their pads replaced, need the treatment fluid, and quietly stop helping the moment someone stops maintaining them, which in a home is most of them within a couple of years. I have seen more neglected systems than well-kept ones.
Where they earn their keep is on an instrument that justifies the fuss and an owner who will keep up with it: a valuable grand, a teaching studio, a church or recital instrument, or a room that genuinely cannot be controlled any other way. If that is you, say so and I will either fit one or point you to a technician who installs them week in, week out. If it is not you, I would rather sell you a room humidifier and a better spot for the piano.
And tune it twice a year
No amount of humidity control removes the need for tuning; it just means the tuning lasts. The pattern that suits this climate is one tuning after the heating season ends and one after the worst of the summer humidity has passed. That way you are correcting each swing shortly after it happens rather than letting two of them compound.
Not sure whether your room is the problem?
I’ll look at where the piano sits when I come to tune it, and tell you honestly whether it needs anything more than moving.