A musician first, a repairer second

Pieter Galvin has been a musician and a singer since the 1960s. The workbench came later, but it was never really a change of career — it was the same curiosity about how an instrument behaves, turned towards putting other people's instruments right.

That gives him more than fifty years in the music instrument and entertainment business, and something a technician working purely from a manual cannot easily have: he has stood on both sides of the instrument. He knows how a guitar feels under a player's hand, which is not the same thing as how it measures on a gauge.

What that changes at the bench

A setup that is technically within specification can still feel wrong to the person playing it. Fret buzz is obvious. A neck that plays stiff when you bend it, a bridge that fights the strumming hand, action that is fine for one player and wrong for the next — those only get right if someone has felt them.

It also changes the conversation about whether a repair is worth doing. Pieter has spent a lifetime around instruments, so he can tell you when a job is worth it, when a different repair would serve you better, and when a sensible instrument has simply reached the end. That answer is free, and it is given before any work is agreed.

What comes across the bench

Guitar work covers setups and intonation, fret levelling, dressing and refretting, neck and truss rod adjustments, electronics, pickups and rewiring, and full restorations of older instruments. Amplifiers are a regular part of it — speaker work, and getting a signal chain quiet and sounding right again.

It does not stop at guitars. Keyboards and pianos, violins and cellos, brass and woodwind instruments, and drum heads all come through the same hands. If it has strings, frets or a soundboard, he will know it.

Whether you are on stage every weekend, or the guitar in the cupboard has been waiting a long time to be played properly again, it is the same bench and the same ears.