Category Archives: Uncategorized

Current Piano Tuning Pricing (September 2022)

Due to runaway inflation, the cost of living crisis and high travel costs I have put my prices up as of this month. My current prices for new customers are:

1x Standard Piano Tuning and minor repairs and maintenance £50

1x Pitch Raise £70

(extra visits for repairs £25 per hour plus price of parts)

Still very modest and competitively priced. Anything you’d like to discuss regarding piano tuning or my pricing system you can contact me on 07542667040

Christmas Piano Tuning Availability

Hello everyone. I hope you’ve all had a pleasant Christmas. I spent the day eating sweets, playing the piano and watching films.

Now that Father Christmas has come and gone, it’s time to resume focus on my piano tuning work. The momentum will start to build up again. A big goal of mine is to find more piano tuning customers closer to home in Sheffield. In the pre-Coronavirus world I managed to earn a reasonable living as a piano tuner, but only a fraction of my work was in Sheffield – I had to travel to other areas on a daily basis. I’m much more appreciative of work in the Sheffield and South Yorkshire area, it’s also a lot safer not to be travelling as much. I’ll spending more time on this website and put more work into advertising.

Piano Tuner Sheffield is still open during lockdown

Lest anyone be confused, I am continuing my work after Thursday as normal in spite of the stricter measures.

During these difficult times, it’s preferable to receive piano tuning requests in the Sheffield and South Yorkshire regions. For one, it greatly reduces fuel costs. Before March I loved enquiries from piano tuning customers in Leeds, Manchester, York, Hull, etc. Getting jobs closer to home and building my reputation as a Sheffield piano tuner is most important to me now, although I still travel widely.

I’m working in the north Yorkshire region for one day on Friday the 6th of November. If you’re looking for a Whitby or Scarborough piano tuner, I’m your man.

 

Outside of life as a Sheffield piano tuner, I make music constantly and I’m obsessed with music production. One good thing about the pandemic is it’s kept me inside more to play keyboards and guitar and write/record my own material, something that is valuable to me. Even though my guitar playing here is a bit rough around the edges (and slightly out of tune, alas), I’m pleased with how it’s shaping up:

The Sheffield piano tuner returns to work

The Sheffield piano tuner is back in business! I’ve finally logged back into my website after a short covid-related break from piano tuning and have solved some of the technical issues preventing me logging in. Now that those issues are solved, this website will be updated more frequently in future.

If you would like to make an appointment for piano tuning, please call 07542667040 or email richard@pianotunersheffield.co.uk

Weekly Update 13/07/16

It’s now July and it’s starting to feel like summer. I’ve had some lovely drives to piano tuning jobs outside of Sheffield, made more pleasant by the short patches of nice weather we’ve had. If you live in Rotherham, Doncaster, Barnsley, Chestefield, Dronfield, Hathersage, Bakewell, don’t hesitate to contact my about possible tunings. I have transport and a car journey is not a problem.

I was asked at a Rotherham piano tuning last week whether this is a good time of year to get the piano tuned. There’s no best time of year to tune a piano – the tuning is constantly fluctuating all year round with changes in humidity (which cause the strings to stretch and contract). As a general rule pianos tend to go sharp in summer and flat in the winter. This is why you should have your piano tuned twice a year. Not only is this crucial if you want your piano to be at concert pitch, but like a car, a piano requires periodic maintenance and piano tuners are the only people able to make these repairs and regulations.

Outside of piano tuning, my band Harmony of Spheres have started gigging, with our first gig on the 23rd of July at West Street Live in Sheffield, the night before the EU referendum result. At the moment we play 70s progressive rock covers (Pink Floyd, Genesis, Marillion, Rush, Jethro Tull and others) with a view to adding original material as we progress. There are a few videos on youtube of that gig, although I’m a bit embarrassed that I bent a string out of tune on of them (as a piano tuner has made my ear too sensitive to anything slightly out of tune). We’re playing in Dronfield on Friday night and at the White Lion pub on London Road, Sheffield on Saturday night, so çome a long if it sounds like something you might enjoy.

 

– Richard, Piano Tuner Sheffield.

Weekly update: 29/06/16

A perfunctory weekly update. Aside from having some house work being done (a new kitchen), the week has seen the usual run of piano tunings across Sheffield, Rotherham and Doncaster (with one in Castleton and one in Barnsley). I also ordered a new tuning lever as my old one was starting to wear out and grip the pins less firmly than it should. Piano tuning tools are always quite expensive, but you’ve got to spend money to make money. It works like a charm and looks a lot like this:

I haven’t got any interesting stories to tell, but I thought I should keep this blog updated anyway. Hopefully, with a few more piano tuning bookings coming in, I’ll have something more to write about next week!

– Richard, Piano Tuner Sheffield.

Weekly Update: 09/07/16

It’s been another busy week of piano tuning in Sheffield and South Yorkshire. Not only did I have another booking at the Cruicible Theater tuning their grand piano for the performance of Flowers In The Attic , I also have had more customers ringing me up from all over South Yorkshire (on one day I travelled from Rotherham to Sheffield to Doncaster for three seperate piano tuning sessions).

I’m raising my prices by £5 this week as although having such competitive prices has allowed me to find a lot more work (which was essential in my first year of tuning professionally), I’m now at the stage where these prices seem unfair to other Sheffield piano tuners and it seems the time is right to raise these prices slightly. A standard piano tuning will now cost £45 (with a £10 discount if it’s your first booking) which is still an absolute bargain as far as I’m concerned. If you’ve already got a booking with me as of today (09/07/16) the new prices won’t apply. The prices page has now been updated with the new prices added.

– 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

Upcoming price changes

I’ve begun thinking about putting my prices up slightly, getting rid of the introductory offer and raising everything by £5 (both on piano tunings and pitch raises). My current prices are well below the going rate, so you are currently getting a bargain if you hire me. These changes may happen as soon as April 2016, so you can still get an astonishingly cheap piano tuning if you book over the next month or so (the new prices will still be cheap compared to what many piano tuners charge, however). Anyone who already has a booking needn’t worry – my current prices will remain until the ‘prices’ page on this website has been updated, which will be in April 2016 at the earliest.

The reason I have kept my prices so low is that I only began piano tuning professionally a year and a half ago after completing my training at Newark College in July 2014, and I’d rather be working more for less money than charging high prices but only getting intermittent work (I enjoy my work). This approach has worked well in the last six months or so, as I’m now receiving about one new query per day.

I have another blog post prepared, a post about broken dampers in the piano action, which I will post next week. I’ve had two customers in the last two days (one in Sheffield and one in Barnsley) whose piano needed dampers fixing, which is a common problem that every piano owner should be aware of. The piano tuning customer in Barnsley had a damper misaligned with the strings, which was easily fixed with a screwdriver by loosing the damper block screws and turning the damper slightly some that it rested on all three strings. The other customer had a different problem: the piano action was resting slightly too far back off the strings (this was easily remedied by taking the action out and putting it back in properly), but as the piano was very old (a 1920s overdamper), the rust and decay of the piano strings had seeped onto the damper felt, causing the strings to ring out longer than they should. Cleaning the damper felt helped for the most part, but there were still certain felts that were so badly damaged they needed to be replaced. More about this next week.

I hope to hear from more customers this week. If you’ve been thinking about booking a piano tuning now is the time to do it! Get ’em while they’re cheap!

– Richard, Piano Tuner Sheffield.