Monthly Archives: May 2016

Weekly Update: 26th of of May

The last two weeks have been busier than usual. Aside from the usual piano tuning jobs scattered across Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster and other parts of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, I’ve had six seperate bookings at the Lyceum and Cruicible Theaters to tune their pianos for rehearsals and for the premire of the play Flowers For Mrs Harris (a musical based on the novel by Paul Gallico). Yesterday evening I caught the bus into town to tune the grand piano in between performances. If anyone has seen the play on its current run, I hope the piano sounded lovely.

On Tuesday I purchased a whole new set of tools for replacing the centre pins (a job I’m required to perform for a Sheffield customer next week). Centre pins are the pins found inside the hammer flange that allows the hammer to move when a key is hit. The bushings holding the pins can become too loose or two tight, which can be remedied by adjusting the action parts (which is usually ill-advised as too much alteration will create an uneven touch across the piano – as a quick fix, however, minor adjustments can be made to the capstan screw, the let-off button or the back checks). In my two years of piano tuning professionally I have thus far been able to get by without replacing centre pins. I think this is mainly because in Sheffield (and the north of England generally) the cold and damp climate tends to swell the flange bushings (and the key bushings for that matter) making them grip the pin too firmly – when this is occurs, I apply some protek lubrication which loosens the grip (this has worked every time so far). In hotter climates the reverse is true: the dryness causes the bushings to loosen their grip. The good news is that I’m at the stage now where I’ve got all the tools I need for piano tuning and for the vast majority of repair and regulation work required on the job.

 

– Richard, Piano Tuner Sheffield.

Last minute bookings

If you are in need of a piano tuner and live in Sheffield (or anywhere else in the South Yorkshire/Derbyshire area), there’s a good chance I can fit you in either on the day you contact me or the day after. I have been piano tuning (in the real world) for almost two years now (that’s five years of piano tuning when you include the three year piano tuning course at college), but I’m far from being fully booked. I generally get one to three bookings a day, seven days a week. There may be a slight issue is for piano tuning customers outside of Sheffield (in Rotherham, Doncaster, Chesterfield, Dronfield , Bakewell, Hathersage, Huddersfield, etc) as you’ll have to allow me a bit of time to get between piano tuning jobs (most of my work tends to be in Sheffield or Rotherham), but if you book early morning or late afternoon/evening this tends not to be a problem. Please don’t think I only book things weeks in advance, my schedule is not as busy as I’d like it to be! On the other hand, booking a piano tuning weeks or even months in advance is perfectly acceptable as well.

– Richard, Piano Tuner Sheffield.

May Update

This is my first blog post in a few weeks. I still intend to update this blog at least once a week, but the last two weeks have been fairly uneventful, so I haven’t had much to write about! Last week I had a last minute booking at a local Theater in Sheffield, tuning an upright piano for rehearsals. I only had two hours to do a full tuning (a pitch & fine) and some voicing/repair work (making sure the keys were equal in touch and velocity) but managed to get the piano in tune and all the keys feeling much more smooth than they were before I arrived. If I had more time I would have spent more time on voicing as the keys still felt a little heavy to me, but rehearsals began at 9:30 AM and I had been there since 7:30 AM, and much of that time was spent on the tuning, so it was a matter of improving the piano as much as possible in that time, before leaving for another piano tuning on the other side of Sheffield.

 

– Richard, Piano Tuner Sheffield