30-day guarantee

I offer a 30-day guarantee on the accuracy of my piano tunings.

My goal is to give you a concert level tuning, however, tuning a piano is difficult and time consuming and there may be occasions when a mistake is made.

On one occasion, I was working on a 100-year-old Steinway grand piano when the repetition lever on middle C broke. Knowing I would have to pull the entire action out of the piano to fix it, I first proceeded with the rest of the tuning. Afterwards it took me about half an hour to fix the broken piece. I put the piano back together, was paid by the customer and went home…. except that after all that effort to repair the key of middle C, I had forgotten to tune the string for middle C. The piano was in perfect tune except middle C was flat. When the customer called the next day, I honored the guarantee and returned to their home to tune that one note.

What the guarantee does not cover:

Mechanical issues – There are many reasons a piano can go flat quickly after a tuning. These can include deferred maintenance and neglected repairs. Loose tuning pins, a cracked bridge, an issue with the pin block, etc… can allow a piano to go out of tune within hours of having just been tuned. I will bring all repair needs to your attention at the time of your scheduled tuning, but such repairs are an additional cost.

String breakage – if a string breaks while the piano is being played, it has the potential to knock the entire piano out of tune. Likewise, if a string breaks while I’m tuning the piano and I install a new string, that particular string will need time to stretch and settle. I usually look ahead in my schedule to find a time in the next couple of weeks that I’ll be in your area again, and we can schedule that time to tweak the brand-new string.

Environmental issues – Setting a piano near an open widow, next to an exterior door or directly in front of a furnace vent can cause a piano to go out of tune quickly. Also moving a piano from one room to another, or worse, moving a piano from one house to another can readily put it out of tune.

If you just bought a piano, it’s best to move it to where you want it and then allow it to acclimate to its new environment for about a week before having it tuned.

Massively out of tune pianos – pianos that haven’t been tuned in ten or twenty years can sometimes be so far out of tune, that bringing it back up to pitch can leave the piano with an abundance of new stress and tension that need to settle over time. In these cases, it may be a good idea to have the piano tuned a second time within a month or two if the tuning sounds like it’s not stable.