Archived version: archive.ph/tbaxT
Yeah, I inherited a piano recently and found there was noone local… that kind of surprised me. I haven’t looked since
‘We’re running out’: decline of Australia’s piano tuners hits a sore note
Submitted 10 months ago by soyagi@yiffit.net to australia@aussie.zone
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/08/piano-tuning-tuners-technicians-australia
Comments
ji88aja88a@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I_Miss_Daniel@kbin.social 10 months ago
Wouldn't there be an app for that now? I don't think it's super complicated to tune a piano once you know how to do it one string at a time. (Each key has multiple strings.)
Zagorath@aussie.zone 10 months ago
This was one of the first results that came up for me when I searched.
TL;DR: after 20 hours of training of prospective piano technicians, one instructor estimated about 35% of them were actually capable of consistently doing it to an acceptable level. Another said it took him 6 months as an apprentice before he felt competent. So, yes, you could do it yourself, but it’s not particularly easy. You need a specialised tuner (for complicated reasons, standard equal temperament tuning apps will cause the piano to sound out of tune), and if you use the wrong tools or technique you can cause much more significant damage to the piano.
I_Miss_Daniel@kbin.social 10 months ago
Surprisingly complicated.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 10 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Unless new training facilities open up at the scale which allows young tuners to learn and come up the ranks as existing technicians retire, concert pianos and players across Australia will suffer, Kinney says.
The last batch of tuners to rise through the industry went through the Australasian School of Piano Technology in east Melbourne, which was run by the technician Brent Ottley.
“If we can’t access somebody here who can fix something that’s broken or meet the needs of a concert artist … then we are seriously flying someone in from Sydney or Melbourne, and that’s just not tenable in the long term,” Sharpen says.
When Scott Davie, an Australian concert pianist, has toured through Australia, he’s played regional shows where the pianos had been tuned but not properly maintained.
Mathew Taylor, Yamaha’s marketing manager and a board member at the Australian Music Association, says the most pressing issue is the shortage of piano technicians who can work with top level musicians.
“To teach piano tuning is a costly exercise and you need to plough the money in … also to broaden it out a little bit into a deeper program to reflect what happens at American universities, where it’s a graduate degree over two years,” he says.
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