Me and my piano have been together for 8 years.

This piano has been an adventure since it first came into my life. It was free, which should mean easy. But no, it was free if I came to get it. And I began to understand right away that pianos are a thing not to be taken lightly. My piano is very heavy.

I took it to my home, and began to refinish it. It took forver, and the process carried me through the toughest time of my life, when my marriage was ending.

But I refinished my piano and it was beautiful in the end. Of course, through the process of refinishing it, I took it apart and got to know it’s insides very very well.

It began to really bother me that I did not know how to tune it. I could see the tuning pins right there. I had no problem tuning my guitar, and I could barely play it. But my piano I knew inside and out. I began to feel like I could tune it, if I could only find the right tool to turn the tuning pin. It was my piano, dammit, practically a limb off my body. I would be able to tune it if only I could find a way to get started.

Naturally, I turned to the internet. I found an old tuning tool on ebay. But I didn’t know if the price was a good one, or if I could do better. I thought I needed just a little more information.

So I found a book on tuning. It came with high reviews online, so I was pretty excited. Once I got it in my hot little hands, i opened it up to find the chapter on tuning tools and tuning.

it seemed that it was not so simple.There seemed to be more to it.

I thought then that i should pay a tuner to come in, and I could watch and ask a lot of questions. I did, and I learned a lot more. My tuner even told me that there was a correspondence course in how to tune pianos. Wow! I was so going to sign up.

Of course, life caught up with me a little bit and I didn’t have time to devote to the pursuit of greater intimacy between my piano and me.

Piano tuning is a career, you know? People can earn a living doing it. But I was too busy doing the things I was already doing to earn a living. Spending all day on pianos was just a dream. I had real work I had to do.

But last night I went to the Pomona Valley Piano Technicians Guild meeting. These people have been piano tuners…no, TECHNICIANS for years. As they introduced themselves, they said, “we probably have more than a hundred years of experience sitting here.”

They were very serious and engaged in their work. It reminded me of other technology conventions I’ve attended, where the people are all eager to talk to one another since it is so seldom that they can find a peer on their level.

Piano nerds. I felt like a noob, but like these were my kind of people. I aspire to be a professional piano technician, but even if I don’t make a career out of it, there is no doubt that i will be learning how to tune and repair my own piano.

Apparently way way back, one of the Patriarchs of their group had become interested in learning to tune pianos. I will have to learn more about this man, but they told me that he was determined to learn the skill. Naturally, he went to a local piano tuner and asked him “Teach me how to tune pianos.”

The man slammed the door in his face. But Mr. Stubborn wasn’t taking no for an answer. He was going to do this thing. He loaded a footpump organ onto the back of his wagon (this must have been before horseless carriages) and took it with him to tune a piano. He tuned the piano to the sound of the same key on the pump organ.

…not the right way of tuning a piano…

Later he found a book on how to do it right, and sold his cow to purchase the treasure.

He later held classes for people in Claremont to learn what he had become a master at: Piano tuning and repair.

This makes me humble. It was so easy for me to find excellent resources to satisfy my curiousity.

It didn’t used to be so easy to learn. It didn’t used to be so available. People were stingy with their knowledge.

This is a great time to be alive. Information wants to be free. But like my free piano, that doesn’t mean it is easy.