When is it enough?

[ANRPiano@AOL.COM]

Karen,

You did not say how flat the piano was when you began and since you said it
had been several years I am going to assume is was quite flat.  

With that premise here are some of my thoughts:
1) I really doubt turning on the heat caused to piano to go all that flat.  It
can take up to a week for a sound board to adjust to a change in environment,
not a matter of minuets  Although, yes, it can have some minor impact on your
tuning, I rather doubt that is what you ran into.

2) I am going to make another inference from your letter; you only went
through the piano one time.  When doing any kind of significant pitch change I
would suggest you plan on at least three passes.  (This is often the most
difficult thing to get across to my tuning students)  A string will generally
move 1/3 back the way it came.  If you raised the pitch 25 cents you should
assume the string can flatten as much as 7 - 9 cents within several minuets
This is the reason we are taught if the piano can take it, to raise the pitch
past A440 during a pitch raise.  If you don't you will still have considerable
pitch raising to do on subsequent passes.

3) If you have moved a string 25 cents and can anticipating it falling 7 - 9
cents don't waste your time trying to fine tune anything closer than 1 beat
per second.  All your efforts at this will disappear very quickly, it will be
out of tune soon regardless.

4) Rather than attempt the impossible first go very quickly (no more than 20
min.) through the piano and raise the pitch.  Or possibly a better way of
stating it: add tension to the piano.  When this is done you can poke all you
like and the piano will have some chance of coming out "good enough".

Andrew Remillard