‘And that’s your full-time job’ is typically the main question asked when I tell people I’m a Piano Tuner. In second place on that list of expected responses is a stunned ‘there must be only two or three of you in the entire country’. This is the bewilderment that comes from those not familiar with the unusual trade of piano tuning.
While a niche industry, it is one I’ve been directly involved with my entire life. As a fifth generation piano tuner I grew up helping my grandfather Fergus Woods and father Anthony repair various piano parts in their workshop while still a child. Often receiving enough money from my repair work to buy a magazine or football stickers from the local newsagents. Since that time, the same piano servicing now pays my rent, insurance and all of the other grown up responsibilities we all succumb to.
Through my teenage and early twenties piano tuning was the last thing I wanted to be involved in. A rebellious spirit toward the trade led me to endure a stressful career in public relations before coming to my senses at the beginning of COVID-19 and moving to England for formal training in the piano tuning trade.
I recall being stunned on our first day in the small piano tuning college in Northampton, an hour north of London. Physics. The fundamental and partial series of vibrating strings. Not a piano in sight. A white board, a lecturer and graphs which transported me back to the trauma of second level mathematics classes. Afterward I immediately rang my father, questioning his thirty-five years in the trade and the knowledge of physics. How was any of this relevant to the process of tuning a piano? I was soon calmed down when he informed me, while the theory is important to know, over time your ears will naturally know what to listen to, what sounds wrong and more importantly, what sounds correct and ensures the notes for the pianist are perfect.
Returning to Ireland having tuned hundred of pianos in practise sessions in the UK during my education, I drove to my first paying tuning in Ireland with a weakness in my legs. Nerves were taking over. To add to this, a friendly family in Tullamore, my first ever clients, decided they would like to watch their piano tuner bring their beloved instrument back into tune. They settled into the couch directly behind me. I sat sweating, tuning and overthinking. A temple piercing headache developed almost instantly. Thirty minutes into the process I had to break the ice, turned around to make small talk and discovered at some stage they’d all left the room silently. Much more relaxed, I completed the tuning as my heart rated lowered. The first professional tuning was done.
Since then there have been numerous unique and wonderful experiences. Equally there have been stressful weeks as someone navigating self employment for the first time, the lack of State support and vulnerability to a somewhat seasonal industry. Once exam season for the many music and second level schools ends in May the piano trade slows down until August and the run up to Christmas.
Boarding my first cruise ship in Dublin Port there was no end destination. My only itinerary on this trip was a list of grand pianos onboard which required servicing. Therefore, the bag packed for this trip was full of tuning tools and I followed the email instructions from Port Officials and those onboard who organised the servicing off their pianos. When you tune on a cruise ship you become one of that days attractions. While tourists queue up for day trips from their ship to Glendalough or Newgrange, some prefer to stare at the piano tuner and tell us about their tuner back home. As someone who adores travel and other cultures I have to be disciplined not to chat all day for fear of ending up trapped onboard until the next Port of call.
The simplest joy in being a fifth generation tuner is finding the secrets inside a piano. It was tradition from the turn of century to the early nineties for piano tuners to sign their name and date of tuning on the back of the piano key — away from public view but as a reminder to the next tuner along of the state of the instrument when it was last serviced. While these dates mean very little to me, the signatures of the four generations of my family members in the trade are the greatest gift. Often it is unexpected, coming to a piano I’ve not been to before, to see my grandfather had tuned the very same instrument in the 1960s or before. We sat at the same instrument, preforming the same process, with fifty years in the different. I often try consider what Ireland and his life might have been like in the 1960s — a young country, JFK, The Beatles being the latest band in town, and how he found customers houses without the aide Google Maps.
At one stage a piano was as common as a couch or coffee table is in the home today. There are now fewer piano tuners and fewer pianos. Since COVID we have noticed an increase in people returning to their pianos, adults taking up lessons once again. Youtube has sparked a small revolution in people teaching themselves the piano and going at their own pace. Public pianos, social media, and self teaching have created a new type of piano player who can find their own audience in new spaces and grow with this instrument. It creates a new exposure for the piano whom its creator in Florence Italy in 1700 could never have dreamt of.
Its is a privilege to continue our reach family history in this niche trade, get the bewildered questions from strangers who have never met a tuner before, and find more signatures from the past inside undiscovered pianos around Ireland.
Gary Woods Piano Tuning 