What I can do for your piano

A piano that hasn’t been tuned in ten or twenty years isn’t simply “out of tune”: it has dropped in pitch. The strings have lost tension and the whole structure has settled lower.

It cannot be brought back in a single pass. It needs a first visit to bring the tension back up to where it belongs, and a second pass a few weeks later to stabilise it, once the wood has adjusted to the new load.

If a double visit is needed, it is stated in the initial quote, so you can decide with all the facts in front of you.

Work on the soundboard and bridge, and replacement of strings and tuning pins when they no longer hold reliably.

These are the typical injuries of climate (rooms too dry in winter, too damp in summer) and of careless moves. Left unattended, they undermine the stability of the tuning and the sound of the entire instrument.

Before proposing work of this kind I weigh up frankly whether it is worth it: on some instruments the cost would exceed the value, and in that case it is more honest to say so.

I prepare and maintain pianos for theatres and concert halls, recording studios and radio and television productions.

It is a different job from working in the home: you tune on site, often just hours before the audience or the first take, and the voicing has to be calibrated to the hall, the repertoire and the microphones.

If you run a theatre, a rehearsal space, a music school or a studio, I can look after the instruments on an ongoing basis rather than on call: visits scheduled through the year, priority on concert or recording days, and a history kept for each instrument so that problems are spotted before they become failures.