Brian Bailey has been a piano technician in Pittsburgh for the past 37 years. 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.
Aural tuning is a technique where the tuners listen to the intervals between notes on a piano.
“Aural tuners sort of hear frequency created by instruments, especially piano strings, the way a prism breaks down light into its spectrum,” Bailey said. “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.”
Aural 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. Bailey calls a badly out of tune piano, “sounding like it’s drunk, because it’s just all over the place.”
Pittsburgh weather is the No. 1 reason why local pianos go out of tune.
“Humidity is the greatest threat to a piano’s tuning,” Bailey said. “So the dryness of winter heating will make a piano kind of go flat because the wood shrinks, and in the summertime when it swells, it'll make the piano go a little sharp.”
Unlike other service professionals, Bailey did not lose his customer base during the COVID.
“I had people calling me who were staying at home a lot and playing their pianos, and all of a sudden they're like, ‘Brian, you know I haven't had my piano tuned for two or three years. It sounds just awful. Would you be willing to come out and tune it?’”
He said customers would leave for a few hours while Bailey worked on the instrument.
Bailey says he has a loyal customer base, but that the shift to electronic instruments has contributed to a decrease in customers during the past 15 years.
Digital pianos are lightweight, portable and can be relatively affordable. Unlike acoustic pianos, they can sound like a sea of strings or a chorus of voices. They also don’t need an annual tuning.
During 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.
“The demand for piano tuning has fallen off because the piano sales have fallen off. People were playing electronic and digital instruments now, which is perfectly fine. Anything that helps people enjoy being creative is a nice thing,” Bailey says.
“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. Every home had a piano in it, practically, but that's not necessarily the case these days."
Bailey says his favorite parts of the job are the people (and the pets) that he gets to interact with every day. He has had the pleasure of serving some customers for more than 30 years.
“The thing that I have enjoyed most is the people. Just getting into people's homes.” Bailey said. “I really enjoy being around people and just meeting a diverse group of people, which is really kind of a fun thing.”
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.
