Why is a piano hard to tune?
A piano is hard to tune because it has more than 250 strings and they are held under very high tension, which means that the tuning pins they wrap around have to be set in a strong wooden block very tightly; and THAT means that you have to have a special wrench to turn them up or down. The tuner starts with one string in the middle of the piano (where you can hear best) and gets the pitch for that from somewhere else, usually a tuning fork. Then he sets about 12 notes right in the same area (a chromatic scale). But if you’ve ever looked in your piano you’ve probably seen that each key has three strings (two or one in the bass)–so he has to block off the outside strings of each key with a strip of felt so only one string will sound at a time for each note. After he gets enough notes tuned in the middle he can work in both directions by listening to octaves that go with the notes already set. The final step is to pull out the strip of felt and tune the two outside strings of each note t
