Our Piano Services
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Piano Tuning
Many factors cause pianos to go out of tune, particularly humidity changes. High humidity causes the sound board to swell, stretching the strings and causing the pitch to go sharp, while low humidity causes pitch to go flat. In newer pianos the strings gradually stretch and wooden parts shrink, causing the piano to go flat, while in older pianos the tuning pins might become loose and not hold the piano in tune very well. For these reasons, many piano manufacturers recommend that brand new pianos be tuned four times by professional piano tuner during the first year and twice a year thereafter. For other pianos that is not brand new, a minimum yearly tuning is highly recommended. We don’t just tune your piano, we also check the overall wellbeing of your piano and fix any small problem while tuning your piano if we can. If any problem identified during the service cannot be fixed we will provide you options to address those issues.
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Piano Voicing and Action Regulatioin
If your piano doesn’t sound the way you like, we can help you by providing a quick piano voicing service. The most common issue with piano’s tonal quality is it sounds too harsh or too loud. This is because the hammer felt density is too high which makes the hammer too hard. We can soften the hammer and balance the tone across different sections to make your piano sound warmer. Other things we can do to improve your piano’s sound is by reshaping worn out hammer heads. This is normally applied to very worn out hammer felt with deep grooves. We can reshape the hammer head and bring back the original shape so the hammers can strike strings evenly. If you feel the touch of your piano is too heavy or too light, we can also help you regulate all parts of actions including key depth, hammer actions assembly and make your piano more enjoyable to play.
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Piano repair & Cleaning
We provide on site quote and can provide most of common piano repair services in your home. If we cannot carry out required services on site, we will take your piano parts to our workshop for repair. Please provide us with as much information as you can about the damage or problems your piano has in your booking. Very often we need to be prepared with required equipment or material. We also provide piano cleaning service for dust and any debri removal.
How much does it cost to tune a piano in Sydney?
It depends on how often your piano has been maintained and the conditions of your piano. Regularly tuned piano in general is in much better shape than pianos that haven’t been serviced for years, therefore it means less effort to service and the cost of tuning such piano is lower. In Sydney and surrounding regions, the cost of tuning a piano range from $150 to $350. The most common price people pay for a yearly tunings service is about $200 to $250. A lot of piano tuners will charge from $300 for tuning an old antique piano. That is because many of those old pianos were not regularly serviced. As a result the conditions of those pianos are poor. Tuning them require extra efforts and time.
Tuning by ear or by using an electronic tuning device?
In this digital era, almost everything has been digitalised, including piano tuning. It is a remarkable creation of such softwares that have enabled many startup piano tuners much quicker than traditional way of training in this trade could. We should not simply dismiss electronic tuning device(ETD). Many professionally designed software are just precise and in most cases correct. It is easy to use and the result is just satisfactory. However, here comes the catch. While it can make a person quickly become a piano tuner without years of training, it is in reality limiting a piano tuners ability to really precisely tuning your piano. Think this way, tuning a piano using an ETD is just like driving following a GPS. Most of time when following a GPS you don’t know where you are and have no idea what to do if you make a mistake or GPS signal suddenly lost. You see each piano is different, you have to tailor its unique design when tuning to achieve the most pleasing result. An ETD surely can get it close enough but very often it is still a bit off from perfect unless you overwrite manually based on what your hear.
That is why my argument is ETD is absolutely useful but only for trained, experienced and advanced piano tuners. If you are beginners and thought you can just tune all piano with amazing result then you are just over confident. If you can’t hear what is wrong or right, then you simply don’t know what you are doing. So when you book a piano tuner, if you care about the quality of their work, just simply ask if you are capable of aural tuning. Even on the day the piano tuner is using an ETD, then you know at least the piano tuner knows what he or she is doing with your piano.
Of course you can also request your piano to be exclusively tuned by ear if you prefer that way. At Magico Piano Tuning, we offer both tuning method. Simply select Aural tuning during your online booking or just request Aural tuning over the phone when making your booking. We’d love to service your piano in that good old fashioned way, just like in those good old days.