Choosing The Right Piano Tuner

As a highly-respected piano tuner-technician, this is a subject near & dear to my heart. Yet, it is also one of my shorter posts, because choosing a tuner is so straightforward.

First, never, ever, choose a tuner on price alone. In every technical field, you get what you pay for, and that’s especially true of piano technicians. And it’s just not that much more expensive to choose a reputable expert over a cut-price hack. Maybe you’ll spend an extra $20-30. Is your instrument worht it?

Second, don’t skimp on frequency, don’t choose to wait a couple years in between tunings. I’m assuming you are one of those piano owners who really cares about your instrument, no matter how fine or humble, or you wouldn’t have read this far. Whether your piano cost $1000 or $100,000, spending a couple hundred bucks every year to keep it maintained should feel like a very modest, no-brainer investment to keep it functioning properly. Obviously, if your family is going through a period where no one plays the piano anymore, you’ll be tempted to let it slide. But it will go out of tune and adjustment on its own, just sitting there, and when piano-playing interest is renewed, you’ll find yourself spending much, much more to tweak it back into shape. It’s less expensive just to keep it up each year.

With those first two points in mind, choosing the right tuner-tehchnician is simple. Just find the best, most highly-recommended and reputed tuner in your area, have him come to your piano, trust him when he describes its current condition and what it needs, and pay him whatever he asks. That’s it!
If he’s that highly reputed, he’s not going to gouge you or take advantage of your lack of techincal piano knowledge by recommending work your piano doesn’t need. Believe me, it takes a long time to build up that kind of fine reputation, he cherishes it, and he’s not going to risk losing all that just to make a few extra bucks off you. Plus, if he’s that good, most likely he has plenty of work and doesn’t need to gouge any of his customers.

There are two ways to discover the best tuner in your area. One way is to use a tuner who is a member of the Piano Technicians Guild, a non-profit organization that puts each applicant through stringent testing to determine their level of skill. So if the tuner has a Piano Technicians Guild card, or the PTG insignia on their business card, you can usually rest assured they are a competent tuner-technician. Usually, but not always.

An even better way is to simply ask the fine pianists and piano owners in your area, who they use. Don’t be shy, call the top piano teachers, local concert artists, or anyone you know who owns an expensive Steinway or Bosendorfer, and find out who they use. Better still, if you live in a city that has major recording studios, where important music is recorded, ask them. Recording studios are perhaps the most finnicky about perfectly tuned pianos, because their pianos are often played by major artists, and the notes played are going to be presevered for posterity and heard by many thousands or millions, so it has to be perfect.

In my early years as a tuner, I got called into a major recording session (for the brass-rock group Chicago) simply because their normal tuner was out with the flu, and I was the first tuner who answered the phone as they went down the list in the Yellow Pages. I tried to do my best tuning, got payed, and went home thinking, “Well that was a lucky fluke.” Three months later, I got a call from Elton John’s road manager saying, “We need Elton’s piano tuned for 2 concerts at the Cow Palace, and we hear you’re the best tuner in Chicago.” Wow! Someone from the band Chicago had recommended me, and that was the start of a career tuning for many fine artists, concert halls and recoirding studios. Tuners: always do your best wok, and piano owners: simply find and hire the best available!

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