How Often Should You Tune Your Piano in Chicago?
By Eathan Janney, Floating Piano Factory
Chicago is not an easy place to own a piano.
I’ve been tuning pianos professionally since 2000, and I can tell you that Chicago’s climate is genuinely one of the more demanding environments for a piano in North America. If you’ve ever wondered why your piano seems to drift out of tune faster than expected — or why your tuner recommends coming back sooner than you’d like — the answer is almost always in the weather.
What Makes Chicago Different
Most cities have seasonal humidity variation. Chicago has extreme seasonal humidity variation, compressed into a relatively short calendar year.
A typical Chicago winter runs from November through March. During that stretch, indoor heating systems run constantly, dropping relative humidity inside homes to 20% or even lower. Wood — which is what most of a piano’s structural and tonal components are made of — responds dramatically to that kind of dryness. Soundboards contract. Pins loosen slightly. The entire instrument shifts.
Then summer arrives, and with it the lake effect. Chicago summers can push indoor humidity above 70% during heat waves, especially in homes without central air conditioning. Now the wood expands. Strings tighten. The piano climbs sharp.
The result: a piano in Chicago can swing through a full tuning cycle just from the change of seasons — even if nobody has touched the keys.
The Baseline Recommendation: Twice Per Year
The Piano Technicians Guild, the industry’s professional organization, recommends tuning pianos at least twice per year. For Chicago, that’s not a suggestion — it’s a minimum.
The two ideal windows are:
Late fall (October–November). After summer humidity has passed and before your heating system pushes the indoor environment into winter dryness. This is when pianos are often at their most stable and a good tuning holds well.
Late spring (April–May). After winter heating season has ended and the piano has had a few weeks to re-acclimate to rising humidity. This is the most common tuning appointment for Chicago piano owners.
Who Needs More Than Twice Per Year
Twice per year is a starting point, not a ceiling.
Serious players and teachers should tune three to four times per year. If you’re practicing two or more hours daily, your ear is calibrated to a precise standard. Drift that would be imperceptible to a casual player becomes genuinely disruptive to a musician.
Performance preparation. Any piano being used for a recital, recording session, or performance should be tuned within a few days of the event — regardless of when the last tuning was.
Newly acquired pianos. If you’ve just moved a piano into a new space, or if the piano hasn’t been tuned in more than a year, it may require multiple tunings before it stabilizes. An instrument that has been allowed to drop significantly in pitch needs what technicians call a “pitch raise” — a rough adjustment followed by a fine tuning — before it can hold properly.
Pianos in difficult environments. A piano near a window with direct sun exposure, above a heating vent, or in a basement with poor humidity control will drift faster than a piano in a stable, climate-controlled room.
What Happens When You Skip Tunings
The most common consequence of neglecting tunings is that the piano drifts progressively lower in pitch. This isn’t just an aesthetic issue — it can become a structural one.
A piano strung to A440 (standard concert pitch) is under roughly 18 to 20 tons of string tension. When a piano is allowed to drop significantly below pitch, the first tuning back up can be rough: strings that haven’t been tensioned in years are less predictable, and the soundboard and plate are adapting to a new tension load. This is why technicians often charge more for a piano that hasn’t been tuned in several years — the first appointment is genuinely more work.
More practically: a piano that drifts lower than A415 or A420 may no longer play in tune with itself even after tuning, and may require multiple sessions to stabilize.
A Note on Humidity Control
The single most effective thing a Chicago piano owner can do — beyond regular tunings — is invest in humidity control.
A piano-specific humidity control system (such as those made by Dampp-Chaser) installs inside the piano cabinet and maintains a stable relative humidity around the soundboard year-round. These systems reduce seasonal drift dramatically and extend the life of the instrument.
If you’re spending hundreds of dollars per year on tunings, a humidity control system often pays for itself in fewer emergency pitch raises and longer-lasting tunings within two or three years.
The Short Answer
Tune your Chicago piano at least twice per year: once in late spring, once in late fall. If you play seriously, aim for three or four. Never go more than a year between tunings.
And if you’re not sure when your piano was last tuned — it was probably longer ago than you think.
Floating Piano Factory provides Essential, Signature, and Premier Care for Chicago piano owners. Book a tuning appointment →