David Weiss has been playing the piano since he was a kid, and for a time after college he performed for a living, but it wasn’t easy.
“You get a little beat up. You’re working evenings, weekends," he recalls. "Often the remuneration isn’t great.”
Then, someone loaned him a book about how the piano actually works.
“I picked this book up and I read it like three times, cover to cover. It was really of interest to me, and there was a piano rebuilding shop not too far from where I was living, and I started working there, and then eventually went to school for this up in Canada."
Today he’s one of perhaps a dozen professional piano tuners in central Virginia – able to adjust thousands of moving parts.
“When I’m tuning a piano, I’m adjusting the tension on 220 strings or so in a very specific order. I can take a guitar or violin. There’s a little peg. I can turn it with my fingers. It’s easy. On piano there is so much tension on the strings that you need a lever 9, 10, 12 inches long to get enough force to even turn it.”
And then there are the pedals.
“If I play a note, a piece of felt hits the string and stops the note," he explains, preparing to demonstrate. "If I put the right pedal down, it rings on.”
There is computer software available to help with tuning and gadgets that replace a traditional and cumbersome tuning fork.
“You need three hands to operate it, because you have to play a note, turn the lever and hit the tuning fork at the same time, so most people – even if they’re tuning completely by ear – they’re using an electronic – you just need one note to get started, and then you build your tuning from there.”
But there’s no exact standard for tuning, because every piano is different.
“It’s wood, leather and felt, and you just can’t make every one the same," Weiss says. "If you went to Steinway Hall right now and you walked into the showroom there could be five Steinway Ds. That’s their flagship piano. The retail price might be $200,000, and if you sat down and played all five, they’d all be vastly different, and the other complication is pianos are so at the whim of humidity fluctuations that you could have a piano perfect at 2 o’clock and at four o’clock it’s changed.”
Which is why any time a concert pianist comes to Charlottesville, a piano technician like David Weiss gets a call.
“They might fly in from somewhere else, + and immediately they’ll go to the piano and play it for three or four hours, and then they’ll walk out and you’ll be waiting there, and they’ll have a list, and typically it’s things like: ‘This note doesn’t sustain as well as its neighbor, or ‘When I push this note down it sounds a little thin,’ or ‘The peddle doesn’t give me exactly what I’m looking for.’”
Concert halls aside, many schools, churches, restaurants, hotels, recording studios and serious musicians have acoustic pianos – so many that Weiss contends there’s a shortage of tuners. He often worked more than 40 hours a week. Now he’s in the process of retiring, but his son is in the business – confident there will always be a place for this instrument like no other.
“The piano’s kind of a whole orchestra in one instrument -- the low notes, the high notes, and you can play every kind of music. If you’re a beginning student, everything is laid out. There’s C, D, E – it just follows the alphabet."
He picks out the tune for Three Blind Mice and concludes, "You can learn that at the first lesson.”
And while artificial intelligence may assist piano tuners, Weiss says the human being will always play a central role. He has carried eight bags filled with the tools needed to repair and maintain 5,000 parts in an average acoustic piano.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
