Understanding the “Pitch Raise” & Piano Tuning: An Analogy

You may have heard the term:

Pitch raise. Pitch adjustment. Double tuning. Stabilization tuning. Comprehensive tuning.

Call it what you will, but what, exactly, is this mysterious extra charge? Just a piano technician’s version of a “unspecified handling fee” to soak you for another few bucks?

Rest assured, no—this is a real thing!

But to avoid getting too deep into the technical weeds, I like to equate this concept with something we all have had experience with: the humble shoe.

Let’s say you’re trying on a new pair of shoes with the laces already loosely threaded into their eyelets. You slip your foot in and adjust the tongue so it’s flat and comfortable. Now, in the interest of time, let’s say you simply pull on the ends of the laces and tie them up. You’re able to stand up and walk around now without them falling off…but they don’t quite feel right—further down the top of your foot, those laces are still pretty loose and your foot doesn’t feel supported. If you just wear them like that, eventually the laces will shift around and you’ll need to untie them, give the ends another tug and then retie. Then again…and again…and again.

Now typically that’s not how we try on a pair of shoes. Rather, we’d take a few moments to start further down the foot and start taking up that slack, pulling a little here and a little there on each side of the lace until your foot feels supported and the laces are uniformly snug. Then each time we take off those shoes, we can simply untie them and gently loosen the top just enough to get our foot out. Putting them back on the next time will only require a little adjustment to the last couple of holes and our foot will still feel snug and supported.

This is the same concept at work in your piano. With thousands of pounds of string tension on the frame of your piano, over time it loosens up, and the pitch drops below what it was designed to hold…like laces on your shoe shifting around and getting looser on your foot.

If we attempt to tune a piano that hasn’t had the strings adequately “snugged up” first, they will shift around trying to even out the tension, like just pulling on the ends of the laces of the shoe without taking up the slack first.

So a pitch adjustment on your piano can be viewed as “taking up the slack before tying them”.

But what else can happen after you pull on the ends of those laces over and over and over…eventually those laces will wear and break. There’s nothing you did specifically to break them—they just finally reached the end of their functional life. This happens with piano strings as well. As your technician comes to “tie your piano’s shoes”, occasionally a string will break. In some instances, it is possible to tie a knot at the break and get more use out of it, but most of the time a new “lace” is needed. Have you ever put in a new set of shoelaces that broke right away? That, too, can happen with piano strings. A piano string will break when it’s going to break—sometimes it’s an imperceptible flaw in the wire, or perhaps a burr on a bearing point—a “rough spot in the eyelet of your shoe”—that will cause it to break.