It hasn't all been plain sailing, though. "I was skipping around in euphoria," he says. Stepping off the bus, he found he could hear beats in between the notes that two birds were singing outside. His eureka moment came one day on the bus home from the college when he found himself counting the beats in the ringing of the bus bell.
It was then I realised all the tuners who had been sitting there before had been doing the same in frustration." "It left behind a perfect semi-circular indent. "After three hours I lost my temper and hit the wall with the round end of my tuning crank," he says. He noted some strange semi-circular marks on the walls as he tried in vain one Friday afternoon to find the "beats" in a bass note. Recalling the early years of his training, he describes sitting in one of the white cubicles, complete with an upright piano that the college had set up for trainees. However, he concedes it hasn't always been like that. "But one hour of putting everything back into place in a piano is my form of meditation." "I'm a relatively anxious person and people have suggested to me that I take up meditation," he admits. "But it's so loud!" he protests.ĭespite Martin describing his work as, at times, "like having an argument with a child that won't behave", he finds the process meditative. "That underwater, wiggly wavering sound? That wavering is what you learn to count." All I can hear is the echo of the single note he has just hit. He patiently talks me through how the job works, explaining, crucially, how a piano tuner is not necessarily listening to the pitch of the note itself but to the "beats", the interference or distortion that occurs when two strings of different intervals are struck together. It only takes five minutes with him at a piano for me to realise how wrong I am. "I never imagined that one day I would be tuning pianos for London's lords and ladies and all these famous people," he says, with a chuckle.īefore meeting Martin, I had assumed that piano tuners learned on the job, without college training. I told my mum at a very early age it was what I wanted to do."Īt the age of 19 Martin enrolled on a three-year course as a piano technician with the London College of Furniture. "I would be there, listening to everything, fascinated. "He was a blind, African jazz player and he would come and work on our piano for maybe two hours," he recalls. His mother kept a piano and Martin remembers being thrilled by the tuner's visits. "There's something very magical about a piano tuner and I realised that early on," Martin says, recalling a humble upbringing in a small suburban rented house with a tin bath and outside loo.
#Piano tuner jobs series
His regular work also takes him from the Roundhouse Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company ("They have a thing about using flying pianos which they have to hoist down from 20ft in the air for me to tune") to the Union Chapel in north London, a live music venue, where Martin tunes the piano for a series of concerts run by BBC Radio 1 DJ Jo Whiley.īut rewind to the early 1960s and this hobnobbing with celebs was all just a glint in a young boy's eye. There was the time he had a tuning "in a shed with James Blunt's band", followed the next day by a job at Wembley with U2. But there are clients with even greater star billing in Martin's diary. I had been hoping to meet Martin, 50, later in the week for a regular tuning at the house of Michael Portillo ("an eminently charming man who makes a very nice cup of tea") but, funnily enough, the former Conservative minister turned television presenter wasn't keen to have a journalist in his house. There's a battered old leather sofa surrounded by speakers, a drum kit, keyboards and, of course, a piano that needs tuning.
We are sitting in the well-hidden, underground Dean Street Recording Studios, a typically anonymous looking Soho dive you can easily walk past at street level. His experiences have provided his friends and family with such a rich vein of amusing and fascinating anecdotes that he is now compiling them into a book, with the working title Diary of a Gay Piano Tuner. Martin's fascination with the trade started with his mother's piano tuner when he was a boy of six or seven and has led him to the upmarket houses of celebrity clients and the recording studios and theatres of the West End.
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