The tuning happens on the day of the session, not the week before, and it happens after the room has been sitting at its session temperature for at least two hours. Book the tuner for the first slot of the day and put the mics up afterwards. If the piano has stood unplayed through a Glendale summer, budget for a pitch raise as well, which is a second pass and roughly another hour. I tune pianos and I record them, and those two jobs disagree about scheduling more than anyone expects.
Why does the day matter so much?
Because the piano is a wooden structure under about 18 tons of string tension, and the wood moves with the air.
The soundboard is a thin panel with a slight crown built into it. When humidity rises, the crown swells, pushes the bridge harder into the strings and pitch goes up. When the air dries out, the board flattens, tension drops and pitch falls (East Coast Piano Rebuilding on tuning stability). The dry-season fall usually exceeds the humid-season rise, which is why an untouched piano drifts downward year on year rather than oscillating around A440.
In Glendale that cycle has a local shape. The city sits against the Verdugo foothills and gets the dry inland air the coastal neighbourhoods do not, so a piano in a room with a wall unit running six months of the year moves further than the same instrument in Santa Monica. A tuning done on a Tuesday for a Saturday session has spent four days in that air.
What actually happens in a pitch raise, and why is it two passes?
Every string you tighten changes the load on the ones already done.
A piano has roughly 220 strings pulling against a single cast iron plate. Raise one string toward pitch and the added tension bends the plate and the board fractionally, which drops the strings that were already set. There is no order that avoids this. The working method is a fast rough pass that deliberately overshoots, so the whole instrument settles down onto the target rather than up toward it, then a fine pass afterwards.
That is why "it was tuned last month" does not answer the question. If the piano was 15 cents flat and got a single pass, it is not at pitch now. It was at pitch for about twenty minutes.
A440 is not a preference. ISO 16 fixes standard musical pitch at 440 Hz for A above middle C. It stops being automatic when the track already exists: if the arrangement was written against a sample library, the library is at 440 and so is the piano. If the session is a live ensemble with players who use 442, settle that with the production before the tuner arrives.
What does a microphone hear that a listener in the room does not?
Unisons, and everything mechanical.
In the middle and top of the keyboard each note has two or three strings meant to sound as one. When they drift apart by a fraction of a cent the ear hears warmth. When they drift further it is a slow beat, two or three per second, and a listener eight feet away barely registers it. A pair of small diaphragm condensers a foot over the hammer line registers it as a wobble no plugin removes, because it is two real frequencies rather than a modulation.
So for a session I weight the work differently than for a recital. Clean unisons across the range matter more than an exquisite temperament in octaves nobody plays on this track. Ten minutes on the two octaves either side of the vocal beats perfection at the extreme top.
The same goes for mechanical noise. A damper that lands with a click, a pedal with a squeak, a bench that creaks under a player who rocks: none of those are audible in the room and all of them are audible on a close mic. They get dealt with before the take, with felt and a drop of the right lubricant, not in the edit.
Where does the piano live, and does the session come to it?
Most of the time the session travels, and that decision is about the room rather than the instrument.
Glendale is a separate city, not a district of Los Angeles, with its own municipal code and its own permits, and the same is true of Burbank next door. That matters when a session runs late or a crew needs to park a truck. It also means the housing stock changes block to block: the pre-war Spanish houses off Kenneth Road have plaster over lath and small rooms with hard walls, while the post-war construction toward the 134 has drywall and lower ceilings, quieter but deader.
My room is at 2226 N Catalina St in Burbank, and central Glendale is roughly six or seven miles from it, fifteen minutes down Glenoaks Boulevard when it is clear and closer to half an hour when it is not. That drive is the whole logistics question. Moving a grand costs more than the session and destabilises the tuning for days. Bringing two microphones, two stands, a preamp pair and an interface to a good instrument in a decent room costs a car journey.
Glendale holds more good instruments than its reputation suggests, and part of that is the media economy around it. The DreamWorks Animation campus on Flower Street covers about 460,000 square feet across five buildings and opened in 1997, at one end of a run of production and post facilities along the same corridor. Where there is scoring work there are pianos, in facilities and in houses within a mile of them.
What about the halls and the screening rooms?
Different job, same trip. The Alex Theatre at 216 North Brand Boulevard opened in 1925, seats about 1,400 and carries a 100-foot neon tower added in 1940. Rooms like that run film programmes as well as live events, and they share a recurring problem with pianos: playback that was calibrated once by someone, then adjusted by whoever was on shift, then adjusted again. Both are mechanical systems that drift, and both are cheaper to maintain on a schedule than to fix the night before an event. What a calibration pass involves is set out in how a monitoring room gets calibrated.
How long should the day be, and what order?
Tuner first, mics second, player third.
A standard tuning on a stable piano runs an hour to ninety minutes. Add a pitch raise and it is closer to two and a half. Setting mics takes twenty minutes if the piano position is decided and an hour if it is not, and it happens after the tuning because stands live exactly where the tuner needs to stand.
Settle one thing before anyone arrives: ask whoever controls the building to pick a single thermostat setting and hold it all day, including the hours before. An HVAC unit cycling between 68 and 76 degrees moves the instrument while you are recording, and takes three hours to notice.
If you have a session and an unknown piano
Send the make, the model, roughly when it was last tuned, and a phone recording of the middle octave played slowly. That is enough to say whether it needs one visit or two, and whether the session should come to the piano or the piano to the session. Full credit list at /credits, background and contact at /about.