Few things are more frustrating than paying for a tuning and hearing the piano drift again within weeks. The good news: there's almost always a specific, fixable reason — and it's rarely that the tuning was done badly.
A piano that won't hold its tune is usually telling you something about its environment, its history, or its physical condition. Here are the real causes, from most common to most serious.
This is the cause behind most "it won't stay in tune" complaints. A piano's soundboard is a large sheet of wood that swells when the air is humid and shrinks when it's dry, and that movement constantly changes string tension. In a Toronto home, damp summers and bone-dry winter heating push a piano up and down in pitch through the year. If your instrument sits near a heating vent, a fireplace, a sunny window, or an exterior door, it'll move even more.
The fix isn't more tuning — it's steadier conditions. Aim for relatively stable indoor humidity around 40–45%, keep the piano on an interior wall away from heat sources and direct sun, and the tuning will hold far longer.
If a piano had drifted well below A440 before its tuning, a single tuning often won't hold — bringing the strings up changes the tension across the frame, and within days everything settles back down. The proper fix is a pitch raise (a correction pass to restore overall tension) followed by a fine tuning, and then a follow-up tuning a few months later to lock it in. If your piano hadn't been tuned in years and "didn't hold," this is very often why.
New pianos are under fresh tension and their strings and structure are still settling. It's completely normal for a new instrument to need several tunings in its first year or two before it holds well. This isn't a fault — it's the piano finding its resting tension.
A move — even across a room — changes the piano's environment, and the soundboard reacts to the new room's temperature and humidity. That's why a piano almost always needs tuning after a move, and why it's best to let it settle for two to four weeks in its new spot before tuning, so the fresh tuning actually holds.
Each string's tension is held by a tuning pin set into a wooden pinblock. In an older or hard-used piano, those pins can loosen and no longer grip well, so the piano slips out of tune no matter how carefully it's tuned. This is a genuine mechanical issue rather than an environmental one, and it needs a technician to assess. Sometimes it's manageable; occasionally it means an instrument is near the end of its tunable life. A good technician will tell you honestly which it is.
A piano kept in tune year after year holds its next tuning better than one rescued after a long gap. If yours has been neglected, expect the first year back on a regular schedule to involve a pitch raise and possibly a follow-up before it settles into holding well.
If your piano keeps slipping despite stable conditions and regular tuning, that points toward pitch or pin issues that need a professional eye. We'll assess it on arrival, tell you exactly why it isn't holding, and give you an honest path forward — including whether it's the environment, a pitch raise, or something mechanical.
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