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Trying to turn down the noise

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Contributed by: Kevin Hamm/YourHub.com on 5/22/2008

Editor's note: Visit our Faces of Broomfield & Westminster page, where YourHub.com staff and readers can introduce you to more people who make this part of the metro area what it is.

Sean Brady's on the lookout for PSOs - piano-shaped objects.

"They're essentially pieces of furniture," says the Broomfield piano tuner, referring to pianos that have seen better days. But to a piano repairer, they also mean business.

Brady's been tuning pianos for six years and last year started Front Range Musical Services. The work is part musician, part acoustician and since pianos are made of wood, part carpenter.

Brady brings what he calls "a very bizarre skill set" to the job. In addition to his piano turning skills, he teaches French horn, composition, music theory and does musical notation, as well. He says that he's a musical "jack of all trades, master of two" -- that would be his two master's degrees in French horn performance and composition. He also just received a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Composition is his passion, but tuning pianos is his bread and butter, he says. He started doing it after he inherited a 100-year-old upright piano. It needed repeated tunings, and as a college student he realized he'd quickly go broke keeping it maintained, so he taught himself how to do it. After working on his family and friends' pianos over the years, he decided to hang a shingle and turn it into a living.

Tuning a piano involves making minute adjustments to the tension of the wire "strings" that are struck by a felt hammer when a key is pressed. While a piano has 88 keys, it has more than 200 strings - three for each of the higher notes, two for the middle notes and one for the low notes. Each string has to be tuned individually. Brady uses an electronic frequency tuner to get in the ballpark of a proper adjustment, but when it comes down to the fine tuning, only the human ear will do.

There's no soft tickling of the ivories while tuning a piano, but rather a lot of banging on the keys, and over the years the noise can get to you a bit, Brady says.

"I don't know too many sane tuners," he jokes.

His is a musical family. His wife teaches violin, and all three of his children play instruments: the cello, piano and violin. They've lived in Broomfield for three years, and Brady, who grew up in Lakewood, says he'd like to one day open a music store that would sell and rent instruments, sell sheet music and have studio space for teaching and recording.

Even though he's a composer at heart, Brady enjoys tinkering with pianos as well as the teaching part of his business.

"There's a long tradition of composers who don't compose for a living," he says. "All musicians have an obligation to teach. Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin -- they all taught music."

From composition to piano tuning, his set of musical skills may seem somewhat disparate, but they unite in a common theme.

"I'm just trying to add a little beauty to the world," Brady says. "I'm trying to turn down the noise."

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