With over 30 years experience in restoring and maintaining pianos including working at Steinway and Sons also studying at the prestigious London College of Furniture Toby tells us where it all began. 

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For as long as I can remember I had a facination with the piano.  From around the age of three I was pestering my parents for a piano, the local teacher would not start pupils until they were six due to the size of their hands so I had to wait.

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On my sixth my first real piano arrived, a "G.P Woodhouse London" upright piano, I loved this piano.  Today I am the proud owner of a K.Kawai baby grand.

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When I was very young I did not have many books and I loved going through the family encyclopaedias, here I found information on the piano and learnt a lot and got to study the pianos history and how they work.  Later I was given some copies of old DIY books showing how to mend early upright and square pianos, this collection of information from old books soon built up and by the age of eleven I was able to name all the action parts of a upright piano and had a very basic understanding of how to fix them, it was around this time I bought some parts from a local piano shop and mended the old worn out piano in the village hall, then a few years later I did the same with a old piano in the church hall.

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when I was 15 I did work experience at a local piano workshop, I learnt a lot in this week.  Then in the holidays my father bought a very old upright for me to repair to then sell, this lead to more people wanting to buy pianos from myself and getting a small job at my local shop and I started doing basic repairs also learning more from the technicians,  I was barely sixteen years old.

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At the age of I eighteen I went to what was "The London College of Furniture" to study piano restoration and tuning.   Whilst here as part of our studies I arranged a visit to Steinway and Sons to the restoration workshop and was very fortunate to get a job as an apprentice with Steinway & Sons in London.

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I often had a piano I was working on at home both whilst at college and Steinways so after a few years and being made redundant from Steinways I started buying up old upright pianos to repair and sell alongside working full time in seasonal jobs to fund my making own workshop.   This lead to starting my own business.  Here I was mainly restoring pianos for customers and selling a few pianos, also fitting silent and player systems as I was keen to explore the marriage of new digital technology with traditional pianos.   

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Things have changed a lot since the early days of the business, today I mainly deal with younger pianos or high end older pianos and mainly restore pianos to sell, though customer repairs are still welcome.

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When tuning pianos I was often asked about teaching in the end I decided to do this as well.

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Playing the piano never stopped, and when playing pianos after tuning I found myself being asked to play for functions and ended up playing professionally in the top London Hotels such as The Ritz, Savoy and many more places such as Fortnum & Mason.

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But the core value remains which is to provide quality piano tuning and repairs also to provide pianos that are value for money.