What owning a piano actually costs

An acoustic piano is the only instrument you buy and then discover, months later, that you actually took out a subscription. It is not a piece of furniture with keys: it is a wooden structure holding some twenty tonnes of tension, and it reacts to the weather in the room it stands in.

This is not an argument against owning one. It is the arithmetic almost nobody does beforehand, and it is worth doing — especially if the piano is for a scene, for a season, or for the corner of a bar.

Buying it is the cheap part

The price of the instrument is the number everyone looks at. It is also the only one you pay once. Everything else repeats for as long as the piano exists: tuning, humidity, regulation, and the day it has to move.

Tuning is not an extra

A piano is tuned twice a year. Not because it went out of tune on purpose, but because the wood of the soundboard swells and shrinks with humidity, and the tension of the strings follows it.

In Portugal a tuning runs to about €100, plus travel. Two a year is a little over €200, every year, without fail. Over ten years that is more than two thousand euros purely to keep the piano sounding as it should.

A new piano, or one that has just moved house, needs more than two in the first year: the strings are still settling.

Humidity, which in Lisbon is a genuine problem

The band a piano is happy in is narrow: between 45% and 55% relative humidity. Makers differ at the edges — Steinway recommends 45 to 50%, Bösendorfer 40 to 60% — but the middle is the same.

What happens outside it:

• Below 40%, the wood shrinks. The soundboard and the bridges crack. That does not undo itself: it is repaired, expensively, or you live with a worse piano.
• Too much humidity oxidises the strings and the tuning pins, and makes the keys sluggish and sticky.

A house in Lisbon spends the summer in damp sea air and the winter with heating drying the rooms out. That swing is precisely what a piano dislikes — which is why pianos living in rooms with a lot of glass, or pushed against a radiator, age faster than the rest.

Where the piano stands is a technical decision

Not wherever there is room. It is:

• Away from an exterior wall, always the coldest and the dampest.
• Away from radiators, fireplaces and air-conditioning outlets.
• Out of direct sun, which ruins the finish and heats the structure on one side only.

On a set none of this is usually possible — which is one reason a piano on a shoot needs a technician nearby rather than one tuning and a wave goodbye.

What almost nobody does: regulation and voicing

Tuning sets the pitch of the notes. Regulation sets the mechanism: key travel, hammer escapement, repetition. Voicing works the felt of the hammers so the tone is sweeter or more open.

Neither is done annually, which is why both get forgotten. A piano that has never been regulated does not break — it just gets slowly worse, to the point where the owner decides they no longer like the instrument when what they dislike is its condition.

Moving a piano costs between €150 and €500

An upright is around 230 kg and a studio grand is over 400. This is not a job for friends with a van: it is piano movers, with a board, straps and protection for doors and floors.

The price runs from €150 for an easy move to €500 when there are stairs, tight corners or distance. And once it has moved, the piano has to be tuned again — which adds the €100 tuning at each end of the trip.

A neglected piano cannot be tuned in a day

This is the part that catches productions out, and it is a question of the calendar, not of money.

A piano that has gone years without tuning sits well below pitch. You cannot simply pull it up to A440 in an afternoon: raising all that tension at once breaks strings and can crack bridges. What the technician does is a pitch raise first, and only then a real tuning — and even so the piano needs two to four tunings across the first year to hold pitch. In the worst cases it takes several visits just to get there.

Translated onto a call sheet: the piano bought on Friday is not in tune for Monday. No budget fixes that, because what is missing is time.

The arithmetic of the "free" piano

They always turn up. Someone inherited an upright and wants it out of the house. The price is zero and the bill is this:

And that assumes the instrument is sound. If the soundboard is cracked, the tuning pins are loose or the felts have been eaten by moths, the repair costs more than the piano is worth, and the next step is paying for transport again to take it away.

For a production the bill is worse still: you buy it, you pay to bring it in, you pay for tunings that will not be finished in time, and at the end of the shoot you own 230 kg of piano to deal with — which is another move, and another €150 to €500.

When buying does make sense

It makes sense for someone who plays every day, for years, in the same place. There the piano is an instrument rather than an expense, and the maintenance is simply the normal price of having it properly in tune.

It does not make sense when the piano is for one scene, for one season, or for a place where nobody will look after it — a bar, a hotel lobby, a shop, a studio recording whoever walks in.

In those cases hiring is not the lazy option: it is the one where the arithmetic works. The tuning, the humidity, the regulation and the technician stop being your problem and come included. And when the season ends the piano leaves — instead of staying to take up space and ask for tunings.