Moving your piano can be a delicate but heavy-duty operation, especially since some older and antique pianos can weigh close to one thousand pounds. For this reason you want to hire a professional piano mover and then get your piano positioned and tuned correctly at its new home. Here are some tips to help you do this.
Choose an Appropriate Location
Inside your home and in the room of your piano's new location, choose a place that is going to be free of cold drafts or excessive heat, such as from a fireplace or a window. Direct sunlight on your piano can cause damage to its interior components from the heat, and it can also fade the exterior of your piano's wood.
If your piano is an upright and you are going to place it against a wall, make sure it is an interior wall of your home and not near any heat vents. Placing your piano against an exterior wall, although insulated, can still cause significant changes in the temperature of and around your piano, which can affect its strings and resulting sound.
Just as selecting the right place to position your piano is important, it is also critical to keep the room's environment at a constant temperature and humidity level. You don't want the room to be too dry or too wet, which can cause damage to the instrument. Use a de-humidifier or humidifier, when necessary to get a controlled balance to the humidity. You can also place several potted plants in the room with your piano to help this. As you water the plants regularly, they will contribute to keeping a proper humidity in the room.
Hire a Piano Tuner
Now that you have selected the perfect spot for your piano and have the temperature and humidity just right, hire a professional piano tuner, such as from Atlanta Piano Tuning By Ear, to readjust your piano to correct its sound. During a move, the change in temperature and humidity along with movement of its frame can cause tiny fluctuations to its strings and leave its tune sounding off. Be sure you choose a professionally trained and certified tuner for the job.
First, the piano tuner will play the keys on your piano to determine how much the alignment of its tone intervals are off between each of the keys. Your piano tuner will then adjust each string either loose or tighter to correctly line up each of the key tones.
If your piano has not been tuned in quite a while or has been stored in an environment that was not climate controlled, the piano tuner will tune your piano, stretching the strings as much as possible to correct its sound. Then, they will need to come back to your piano in several months for a follow-up tune to get the piano's sound just right.
