I encourage anyone with a website to post their rates. It gets the information right out there where everyone can see. I have issues with the whole idea of a "normal tuning". I assume that means no pitch raise necessary? And perhaps this also means that you are basically just turning pins. Just tuning a piano is generally not good piano service. We got away from charging for a tuning around 10 years ago. Granted, there are times when a service appointment is taken up with mostly tuning, but that is rare. Many clients don't really even know what tuning is. What they are after when they schedule their appointment is a higher quality of experience when they play their piano. So my advice is to charge enough to motivate yourself to do all those little extra things that will deliver exceptional service to your client: Tighten the bench, vacuum out the interior, lubricate key pins, take up lost motion, adjust the hammer line and or let-off, even out the voicing, get the clunk and the squeak out of the pedal, etc. There is never any shortage of tasks to fill your time. One of the frequent things I hear my clients say is "the last tuner never did all that!". Generally technicians underestimate what they can get away with charging for their services. For the past few years we have been raising our rates at least 6% every year around July or August. Our rule is that if we have been consistently booked up throughout the year then we go ahead and raise them. More frequent increases are less of a shock to clients. The few clients we lose over an increase is more than made up for by the increased income. If you are not raising your rates, keep in mind that you are actually getting a pay cut due to inflation which is around 3% per year. On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 3:07 PM, J. W. Stein <musicnow at frontiernet.net>wrote: > Hi, > > I am sure that this question was asked sometime ago, but I probably missed > it. Anyway, I am wondering what piano tuners are charging these days for > normal tunings. I realize this is an open ended question and that it's > probably somewhat based on what the market will bear. But I wonder if there > is an average (price range) that can be gleaned from this question. > > Jon > -- Ryan Sowers, RPT Puget Sound Chapter Olympia, WA www.pianova.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101209/184fe77b/attachment.htm>
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