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.