Bio

I was a keen musician from an early age and grew up in a musical household. Some of my earliest memories are of listening to my mum play the piano and my dad play the guitar, and of watching our home piano being tuned and being confused by the process!

After leaving school I enrolled on the famous piano tuning and repair course at Lincoln college (at its site based in Newark-on-Trent) in 2011, an idea sparked by watching a piano tuner work on my mother’s Offenbach piano. I graduated in 2014 with a thorough grounding in piano tuning, repairs, regulation, voicing, evaluation, selling and restoration. To gain some extra experience I worked with another piano tuner as a mentee, which taught me that pianos in the outside world are often different to the ones we laboured over at college (in many ways easier to work with)! As I built up my business I played guitar and keyboards in rock bands, supporting artists such as Martin Barre of Jethro Tull (pictured below) and Saxon. I also did some production work for local bands and occasionally did the live sound at gigs – I hope it all helped to improve my ear!

From 2014 to 2018 I tuned pianos mostly in Sheffield and the surrounding area, but decided to relocate to Leeds in 2018 to be in the centre of Yorkshire. This makes travelling to piano tuning clients in areas such as Bradford, Keighley, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Harrogate, York and Manchester a lot easier than it was when I lived in Sheffield. Since then I have tuned for schools, churches, hotels, piano teachers, session musicians, concert pianists and discerning piano-owners all across the north of England, with all my clients appearing very satisfied with the results!

In my spare time I enjoy going for day trips to Robin Hood’s Bay and Hornsea, playing the guitar and keyboards in rock cover bands, and watching funny cat videos on youtube.

 

– Richard Lidster, Piano Tuner Leeds.