Piano Articles

How pianos work, what makes them drift out of tune, and what actually keeps them stable — written for owners and technicians alike.

Technical Mechanics

Yamaha's 37 Steps: What the Regulation Course Is, and Why the Order MattersThe 37 Steps gets talked about like a document you could read. It's a three-day course that came out of Yamaha's Little Red Schoolhouse and moved to the Piano Technicians Guild in 2012. Here's what it is, and why regulation has a fixed order in the first place.Should You Remeasure Inharmonicity After a Pitch Raise?Pull a piano up fifty cents and the inharmonicity number in your device reads about six percent high. Here's what that's worth in cents, why it lands at both ends of the keyboard instead of the treble, and why the reason to remeasure isn't the physics.Pin Torque and Tuning Stability: You're Reading the Wrong NumberPin torque has a floor and a ceiling, and a reading taken on a strung piano is part block grip and part string tension. What the number can tell you, what it can't, and the ten-minute arithmetic that gets you a better one.