One of the highlights of Bailey’s career was sitting down for a glass of orange juice with Fred Rogers after tuning his wife Joanne’s concert piano. “I really enjoy being around people and just meeting a diverse group of people, which is really kind of a fun thing.” Just getting into people's homes.” Bailey said. “The thing that I have enjoyed most is the people. But if they are very good yes then tip, if not good and that means average to poor then no tip. Piano tuners in this country do not make big bucks. If the former we provide refreshments only. He has had the pleasure of serving some customers for more than 30 years. Well, in my view it is solely down to whether self-employed or not. Every home had a piano in it, practically, but that's not necessarily the case these days."īailey says his favorite parts of the job are the people (and the pets) that he gets to interact with every day. “But the desire to own an acoustic piano is not as great as it was, say back at the turn of the previous century - early 1900s. All you will need to do is to keep an extra head/tip assembly in yr tool kit. Ideally, the tip should cover the squared-off portion of the pin and fit. I I figure Ive tuned over 25000 pianos in my life, and Ive definitely. Anything that helps people enjoy being creative is a nice thing,” Bailey says. TOOLS To tune a piano, you'll need a tuning lever (or tuning hammer) a tuning. People were playing electronic and digital instruments now, which is perfectly fine. “The demand for piano tuning has fallen off because the piano sales have fallen off. They also don’t need an annual tuning.ĭuring the past decade, sales of upright pianos have dropped by 41.1%, while grand piano sales plummeted by 61.1%, according to the National Association of Music Merchants. Unlike acoustic pianos, they can sound like a sea of strings or a chorus of voices. Bailey calls a badly out of tune piano, “sounding like it’s drunk, because it’s just all over the place.”ĭigital pianos are lightweight, portable and can be relatively affordable. “When we hear a string vibrate, we not only hear the fundamental pitch of the string that you note that you're playing, we hear the octave above that in the fifth above that in the fourth, and we can separate that individual frequency and sort of concentrate on just it.”Īural tuners discern whether or not a piano is in tune by listening to a string’s overtones - the tones that resonate above the fundamental pitch. “Aural tuners sort of hear frequency created by instruments, especially piano strings, the way a prism breaks down light into its spectrum,” Bailey said. He uses his grandfather’s tuning fork to aurally tune pianos for Heinz Hall, the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, local universities, and thousands of homes.Īural tuning is a technique where the tuners listen to the intervals between notes on a piano. After looking at our piano, he wrote how much he'd charge me on a piece of paper. Brian Bailey has been a piano technician in Pittsburgh for the past 37 years.
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