Ryan Sowers

Every once in a while, I open up a piano for a routine service appointment and discover that I've been invited to work on a particularly interesting piece of piano history. This week, it was a Grotrian-Steinweg Model 120 upright, serial number 41798, built in Braunschweig, Germany. According to Grotrian-Steinweg's own historical serial-number records, the company finished 1921 at serial number 39,802 and 1922 at 42,075. That dates this piano to 1922—making it about 104 years old. And...

Pianos often sound better in exactly one year than in six months. What?? It sounds counter-intuitive. But it's true! And I've seen it over and over in my 30+ years as a professional piano technician. How can this be? It's because the tension on the strings rises and falls with humidity changes — and not uniformly across the keyboard. Some pianos can drift noticeably out of tune in a week. Other times, I’ve returned to a piano I tuned over 10 years earlier and it only needed a touch‑up. The...