The piano tuners

“Luc always used an oblique phrase to describe how he acquired his pianos. It was never ‘I bought’ or ‘I traded’ or ‘I bid at an auction’; he said a piano ‘has come to me’ or ‘has arrived,’ as if it were an angel that had appeared on his doorstep. ... The way he referred to their ‘arrival’ really did correspond to how he felt; they were so many spirits who came to live with him for a while and for whom he would care until they departed.”

“The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier,” by Thad Carhart

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Close your eyes.

They won’t help you much anyway as you listen to Willie Hoffee work.

“There’s nothing really to look at on a piano,” says the pony-tailed technician as he prepares a small Kimball upright for a customer at Mill’s Music.

Some piano technicians use digital tuning gauges. Not Hoffee. He tunes by ear.

So does Dennis Franz, a 33-year veteran regarded as a master craftsman called upon to tune some of the finest pianos in the area. It’s his full-time career.

Hoffee does it part time while playing guitar in his rock cover band 1169.

But both technicians trust their ears and hands, making imperceptible adjustments to a piano’s strings, taking its sound from dissonance to purity.

It takes an intense level of concentration, but you can hear it, too.

Hoffee taps an out-of-tune key. It sounds sloppy, wobbly and disoriented. He calls it “painful.”

He twists his tuning hammer, a ratchet-like tool that turns the pins to which the 220 strings of a piano are connected. Gradually, that tone becomes cleaner.

Hoffee knows why. He’ll explain it using wavelength physics, illustrations of wobbly roads and a plea for imagination. But the point is, he, Franz and other skilled piano tuners just know when a note sounds right. And when it is right.

“It is exceedingly accurate,” Franz says. “It is completely objective. It is not subjective at all.”

It just takes practice. Franz estimates it takes a year or two before you can tune someone’s home piano and more than five if you aspire to tune concert pianos.

These two have been at it a collective 42 years.

Hoffee grew up in Yakima and has always played guitar. He studied ear training at Yakima Valley Community College.

He always wondered if it would help him in a career. One day, working part time in guitar service at Talcott’s Music, he found himself enthralled with the piano tuner’s work.

“I thought a brick hit my head,” he says.

He enrolled in piano technology at Vancouver’s Piano Hospital, a school for the blind. He was one of two sighted students in a class of eight.

When he graduated in 2000, he took a two-week course from Yamaha in Los Angeles.

Today, he divides his time, and income, equally between his guitar playing and piano service. He charges $80 per piano and works on 75 to 100 per year.

His wife, Teresa, is a registered nurse. His daughters are ages 7 and 13. Yes, they are musical. They both sing. The elder plays the cello; the younger aims to study the violin.

He gets philosophical about piano tuning, calling it “a never-ending source of awe” that “blurs the lines between art and science.”

“You could be vacuuming up mouse droppings one day and the next day be tuning a $40,000 grand piano,” Hoffee said.

Franz works on some of those expensive pianos. He’s on call for The Seasons, the Yakima Symphony Orchestra, the Capitol Theatre and Yakima Valley Community College, plus numerous school districts and churches.

In January, he tuned a Steinway, rented from Spokane by The Seasons for a five-part series of Beethoven piano solos. A trip through changes in temperature and humidity causes the wood of the piano to destabilize and the strings to tighten or loosen. He spent nine hours over several visits adjusting the piano for that performance.

Sometimes, the artists themselves have preferences. He often will spend hours adjusting, say, the piano key’s “touch weight” to please an artist who will play for 15 minutes or so.

“A lot of piano players ... they don’t know anything about the pianos themselves.”

It’s tiring and nerve-wracking. Sometimes he can’t even watch the performances.

Franz grew up in Ritzville, one of two children of parents who insisted he learn to play the piano. His mother sat with him while he practiced two hours a day for 12 years.

He didn’t like it and gave it up when he turned 18. He went on to earn a master’s degree in agricultural economics from Washington State University.

His wife, Kathy, is the human resources director at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital. Her work brought them to their home in Selah.

But he kept his appreciation for piano and longed to run his own business. So, he signed up for apprenticeships and classes through the Piano Technician’s Guild, a nationwide certification association. The only other Central Washington registered tuner is a man in Ellensburg.

He’s still a member today, upgrading his education four or five times a year, occasionally teaching a class.

Franz also tunes pianos in people’s homes and restores two or three grand pianos a year.

He services 600 to 650 pianos a year, charging $95 for each tuning.

He was vague about his earnings, though he said his career would have supported himself, his wife and two children over the years. He now has two grandchildren.

He appreciates a clean-sounding piano, but doesn’t wax as philosophical as Hoffee. In fact, he talks little and does it quietly.

When he speaks, he focuses on the labyrinth of mechanical details under the hood of a miniature grand inside the Ahtanum Pioneer Church. A rebuilt action, the row of felt-covered hammers that bang the strings, sits on the ground waiting to be installed.

“It’s not a big piano, but it’s important to this community here,” he said.

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