Blog

Meet Daniel Kendrick- One of our recent Piano Tuning School graduates. Daniel is the proud owner of Kendrick Pianos in the Nashville Tennessee area. Thanks to his hard work and dedication, Daniel finished our online piano tuning course in less than 2 months! Kendrick … Continue reading →

I figured its about time to tell you why I personally went to piano tuning school. I am a second generation piano tuner and the owner of a mid sized used piano shop in Arizona. I attended piano tuning school when I was 20 years old in hopes of starting my own piano tuning business. My grandfather was a piano tuner for his entire life and since he was winding down in a nursing home, I decided to pick up the family business and learn to tune pianos. 

Piano Tuning School

I cant tell you what school I went to for legal reasons but I will say they are one of the most popular correspondence based piano tuning schools in the country. It took me just a few months to finish the piano tuning course and begin practicing my new piano tuning trade on my

How to Tune a Piano

Learning how to tune a piano can be a very fun experience if you learn how to tune a piano the right way. Like everything else in life, there is a right way and a wrong way to tune a piano. The wrong way involves taking your piano apart yourself and using some sort of socket wrench to turn the tuning pins. This is not the write way to tune a piano by any means. You may not believe this but most piano tuners attend some sort of piano tuning school before starting their piano tuning business. You also may bot believe how cheap piano tuning school can cost!

Choosing Online Piano Tuning School

There are many choices when looking for a piano tuning school. Unfortunately there are not too many piano tuning schools that offer online classes. In fact there were none until a year ago! The Piano Technician Academy is currently the only completely online piano tuning school in the country. As far as we know, we are the only online piano tuning school in the world as well!

How do you Learn Piano Tuning?

Choosing what piano tuning school you are going to attend is not an easy task. First you need to know how you work best. Since most piano tuning schools are correspondence, you need to figure out whether you would rather learn from a work book or an online class room. At The Piano Technician Academy we use a unique online learning environment that allows you to go through each lesson as a slide show, a online webpage reading or print it out as a PDF. This gives our piano tuning students freedom to study in any way they like.

Welcome to the first blog post for The Piano Technician Academy, the first and only online piano tuning school in the country!

About Me

First off, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Michael Stilwell and I am one of the professors here at the www.ThePianoTechnicianAcademy.com. I am a second generation piano technician and the owner of Stilwell Pianos located in Tempe Arizona. Stilwell Pianos has been in business since 1956 and was started by my grandfather Ralph Stilwell. I took over the tuning and repair business about 6 years ago and have since turned it into a “brick and mortar” used piano shop in Arizona.

As a professor at The Piano Technician Academy, I believe learning how to become a piano tuner can not be done by simply taking a course at our piano tuning school. That may shock some of you but becoming a piano tuner has to involve hands on practice in the field. Our course is designed to prepare you to enter the field. OUr students are encouraged to practice on as many pianos as possible while taking the course AND after taking the course. It is also advisable to contact other tuners in your area and ask if you can “shadow” one of their work days.

In piano tuning school you will obviously learn how to tune a piano but it is very important to understand why pianos need to be tuned. At the Piano Technician Academy we feel that knowing how a piano falls out of tune is the first step in learning how to tune a piano.

The average piano has around 230 strings, each pulled to around 50 -100 pounds of pressure. This pressure totals around 18 – 20 tons and is placed on the Iron Plate and the Wood Frame.  This alone is enough to make a piano go out of tune but the atmosphere also plays a role as far as tuning is concerned.