Piano Tuning and Service

In addition to preparing all of the pianos on display at Nick's Piano Showroom in Bonita Springs, Nick also serves venues such as the Center for the Arts of Bonita Springs, Southwest Florida Event Center and other performance venues, and is available for in-home service to private clients in North Naples, Bonita Springs, and Estero.

I welcome your inquiries so that I may achieve the finest results that are possible for your piano with over 30 years of experience.  I was schooled from the generation of 'only by ear' tuners and have never used an electronic tuning device, which has helped me to have excellent voicing skills.  Voicing involves analyzing and adjusting the tone of your piano to be warmer, brighter, or more consistent.  This service puts the finishing touch on a finely tuned piano and is often essential to achieve the best overall result, since the felt hammers wear and thus harden to different degrees in different registers of the piano, making the tone uneven over time and use.

Recordings of pianos I have tuned and voiced are available on the internet and have been lauded by experts for the results obtained.  My service is especially appropriate for owners of high quality grand pianos.  Please call Nick directly at 239-206-4541 to schedule service.  Same day appointments are possible after store hours.  Here is a recent recording of a piano I tuned for professional pianist Doug Williams:

For the pianos that are for sale at Nick's Piano Showroom I place the highest priority on providing thorough service.  I am keenly aware of the need, especially of new pianos, to be properly serviced by the dealer before delivery.  This dealer prep work includes regulating the action parts for evenness of touch, fine tuning, and voicing (tone regulating).  These 3 items, when performed by the dealer as part of the pre-sale service, will benefit the instrument and your future enjoyment of it greatly.

Most pianos arrive from the factory needing a fair amount of regulating, tuning, and voicing before they sound and play their very best.  But dealers vary greatly in their willingness to provide this necessary pre-sale service, if at all, because of the considerable expense involved.  You want a dealer like Nick's Piano Showroom that maintains high service standards.  Naturally, a dealership owned and run by a piano technician is likely to be more conscientious in this regard.

FINE TUNING:  

New piano strings require many tunings before they stop stretching and will hold a tuning for a reasonable length of time.  The piano will receive several tunings in the factory before being shipped, but afterward will need more tuning by the dealer before becoming fully stabilized.

REGULATING:

Regulating refers to the fine adjustment of the thousands of action parts in order to achieve the maximum responsiveness of touch.  These adjustments may take the form of turning adjusting screws or making precise alignment adjustments for each key.  There are many adjustments that have to be made; some of them to tolerances of just a few thousanths of an inch to the action, keys, dampers, strings and pedals.

VOICING:

Voicing means regulating the tone of the piano, and mostly involves adjusting the shape and density of the hammer felt in order to adjust and refine the tonal quality and note-to-note consistency.  If the piano sounds too bright or harsh, the hammers are pricked with needles to soften them; if too mellow or dull, hardeners are usually applied.  As a concert piano technician, voicing is one of my areas of expertise, as this skill is necessary in order match the piano's tone to the exact preference of the pianist.