Article Contributed on: 2/18/2009 1:04:18 PM
Bruce Johnson kept star musicians shining bright
In a workshop strewn with piano guts and overturned cabinets, Bruce Johnson showed off the inner mechanisms of a piano's hammers.
"From the time you hit the key," he said, "to the time the note plays, there's 43 parts involved. It's more complex than a lot of people think. When you play a note, on average, your hammer is striking at about 60 to 65 miles per hour. If you hit it real hard like Jerry Lee Lewis, it travels closer to 200. It's amazing how much punishment that a mechanism like this will take."
Johnson knows all about just how much it will take. For 49 years, he's been working on pianos and, these days, runs his own business repairing pianos and doing house calls for tuning. His work takes him all over the Denver metro area and as far as Grand County. But the real story is how he got there.
Johnson learned the basics at a high school for the blind in Iowa, before taking a program at the School of Piano Technology for the Blind and Piano Hospital in Vancouver, Wash.
After moving to the Denver area, he set up his own business in 1973 and has kept pianos in tip-top shape for Fey Concerts at the Rainbow Music Hall for 20 years. Johnson worked for more famous musicians than he can remember.
"If there's one thing I regret I didn't do," Johnson said, "I didn't write down all the different people. I'd done all that concert work, never got an autograph." The hectic schedule and exacting demands of performers, instead, kept him plenty busy.
"You gotta get in there and get the job done and go on your way," he said. "The thing that I've found with most of your stars is that they actually appreciate not getting a pen and paper shoved in their face every time they meet somebody." All the same, though, Johnson says "I wish I'd kept a log."
On maintenance, Johnson said work can be difficult when customers aren't aware of how much a piano needs tuning.
"The soundboard is wood," he explained. "It swells and expands and contracts with changes in humidity." The changes in humidity will swell and warp the wood components -- everything from keys to the soundboard -- which will, in turn, change how fast keys strike and how tense the strings are.
"I've gotten calls where the piano hasn't been tuned in 20 years," he said. "It's horrible." He advised that a piano be tuned every year and any time it's put into a new environmental humidity.
"I'm all about service and trying to educate the public," Johnson said. "If people learn more about their piano hopefully they'll take better care of it."
To reach Bruce Johnson Piano Service, call 303-421-9167.