A family built on music

Andrew Friend has spent fifteen years getting his hands into pianos, not just tuning them. He finished his apprenticeship in 2013, and in December 2025 took over the client base and premises of WS Pianos in Pretoria, continuing the same standard of care his clients already knew.

Music runs through the whole family. Everyone sings or plays something, and the Friends have been part of music ministry across South Africa for years. Andrew, his sister Lee, and their father are songwriters, with songs covered nationally. As small children, Andrew and Lee sang three-part harmony with their mother, and later quartets with their father.

Andrew learned bass on his father's old upright bass, the one he played in church. As a boy, too small to reach the tuning pegs from standing, he'd pull the piano chair over to the record player, then push it across to the bass, tune the instrument by ear, and play along with the record. Not long after came his first upright piano, and from there the pianos never stopped. He has always had perfect pitch. A family friend, Piet Grove, a piano tuner himself, remarked on Andrew's ear when Andrew was seven or eight years old.

These days Andrew plays bass guitar, upright bass, guitar, piano, sax, and trumpet, and sings in trios and quartets. His house is never quiet. There's always music playing somewhere in it, which might be the best explanation for why he ended up spending his life around pianos.

He doesn't teach lessons. What he does is tune, repair, restore, and sell pianos, and travel to wherever the work is, treating a first upright with the same care as a family heirloom grand.