I am a fifth generation piano tuner. Our family history in the trade goes back to the late 1800s. Since that time my family have prided ourselves on attention to detail, expert tuning and good humor and fun.
I learned much about the piano business from my Grandfather Fergus Woods and my Father Anthony Woods. I grew up around pianos – helping in their workshop from a young age before moving to England to learn the trade in full. Returning home, I now work as a self employed tuner but often spend days in music schools or other music venues with my Dad tuning
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.
Gary Woods Piano Tuning 