Piano Training Question (Long)

[Geoff Sykes]

Thank you Israel!

<- Insert hearty round of applause here ->

It wasn't until I was well into the Potter course that I realized that there
even were legit schools for piano technology. But even if I had, age, time
and resources would have prevented me from attending one of them. Potter's
course, in retrospect, was a great primer on piano technology. If nothing
else it provided me with enough of a foundation in the craft that I could
attend chapter meetings and conferences, hold reasonably intelligent
conversations and actually understand and absorb what was being discussed. I
have had the extreme good fortune to receive much hands on training from
several notable members of the Los Angeles and South Bay chapters. And now,
three years after completing the Potter course, and getting ready to take my
second stab at the tuning exam, I am more and more realizing just how much I
have learned and mastered since I began. I'm also realizing that as good as
I think I know I am now, even once I pass all three RPT exams I'm still
going to be just a novice. There is no replacing good mentoring, practice
and years of experience in mastering our craft. And I am looking forward to
years of continuing this learning process. I echo what Alan Barnard said:
"...it has been the PTG that made most of the difference. I would not trade
my membership in this great organization and the association of my dear
friends and colleagues for anything!"

-- Geoff Sykes
-- Los Angeles







-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of Israel Stein
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2007 8:55 AM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: Piano Training Question (Long)


To the list,

I have been watching this discussion with a great deal of interest, 
because I have been involved in aspects of technician training 
through my work with the PTG in various capacities for many years now 
- first on the chapter level, then on the national - and perhaps 
international - scene. For years now I have been observing technical 
skills attained through various learning paths as demonstrated on PTG 
exams and working on developing methodologies to fill the voids left 
by the typical trial-and-error or correspondence school training that 
most practitioners in our field bring to the profession. So to the 
extent that I can, I'll share my observations.

My own background is an echo of what others have posted. After a 
career in commercial photography fizzled out, I got interested in 
piano technology (after having built a kit harpsichord -  but that's 
a different story.)  First I tried to tech myself using the Reblitz 
book - after all, how difficult could it be? I found that book quite 
flawed - there were a bunch of processes and procedures described, 
but no overall understanding of why one was supposed to do things 
this way or that way and no good understanding of how to judge the 
results (most obviously of a regulation, but in other contexts too). 
It was sort of flying blind - you follow the recipe and trust that 
the result is correct, because Arthur says so... I then signed up for 
a correspondence course - not Randy Potter's - and found the same 
problem. I was doing assignments, learning nomenclature and 
processes, but the piano I was working on didn't seem to be improving 
much... And I had no idea what my tuning sounded like, objectively 
speaking - even though I counted beats until I couldn't hear them any 
more... Then life intervened...

Some years later I got an opportunity to move to Boston and attend 
the North Bennet Street School for 2 years, and I found out that my 
initial judgements about the Reblitz and the correspondence course 
were basically correct. The processes and procedures being taught in 
those media were hit-or-miss at best and plain incorrect in some 
cases. I did have a leg up on the other students in terms of 
nomenclature - quite a bit of money spent on something I would have 
learned anyway... I did come away from the correspondence course with 
a nice three-ring binder which still holds some of my NBSS notes...

At NBSS I got a good background on which to build a comprehensive 
approach to piano technology - both the tuning and technical end of 
it. And passed the RPT exams on the first try without a hitch before 
completing my first year at school. And after a bit of struggling (I 
am not very good at promoting myself) I have been able to make a 
decent living at it, build two businesses - one in Boston and after 
moving another one in California - worked  Steinway C & A in Boston a 
couple years after finishing school, and now also hold a half-time 
University job which gets me health insurance and retirement benefits 
- besides running a very busy practice.

I will concentrate on the technical end - because that's where my 
testing and educational efforts have been concentrated.

Without a good conceptual grasp of the nature of the technology on 
which the piano is based, the properties of the materials from which 
it is built or which are used to service it, the goals of the 
procedures one undertakes and the various possible pitfalls of 
various approaches one is a very incomplete practitioner. To be fair, 
some self-trained or correspondence-school trained technicians 
develop this knowledge on their own after years of experience. Many 
do not. And most don't have nearly enough of it in the first years of 
their practice - resulting in misdiagnosed conditions, misapplied 
remedies, misregulated instruments and much wasted time. And clients 
being charged for - what?

In a school environment one gets to internalize all of that 
theoretical and intellectual underpinning as one is learning the 
tools and the procedures. And in a school environment one gets 
immediate feedback on the quality of one's learning. But more on how 
important that can be later.

Soon after graduating from NBSS I got involved in PTG technical 
testing - a lot more heavily than I intended to. It was a funny 
story. This was the time the PTG was introducing the current 
Technical Exam (late 80s) and our committee chair couldn't make heads 
or tails of it - since it is based on an empirical approach to 
regulation rather than just plugging in specs from a book. Apparently 
a novel concept for this grandfathered RTT. So he dumped the whole 
thing in my lap. I went to a convention and learned how to run the 
exam from an experienced examiner...

Boston was (still is) a very busy testing venue - so I got a good 
overview of the skills that technicians of various backgrounds bring 
to the trade. Later on I went on to head the Technical Testing 
program in the San Francisco Bay area (we have an Exam Board that 
test all comers - but basically covers the territory of 4 chapters), 
and for the past several years the technical testing at the PTG 
Annual Conventions. In addition, I have organized and taught various 
Exam Preparatory classes (that's actually a major con I have been 
perpetrating on the students - they are actually "basic skills" 
classes, but nobody would sign up if I called them that - pride...) 
So after a good 100+ exams administered and some dozens of classes 
taught I can say without equivocation that many, many candidates and 
students with a correspondence school, self-taught or mentoring 
backgrounds are still quite deficient in basic skills.

To be perfectly fair, this is not entirely the fault of the 
correspondence courses, or the learning materials. Where there is no 
supervised practice and immediate feedback on technique and 
methodology, the opportunities for misunderstanding and 
miscomprehension are endless. I have seen this in classes I have 
taught and in some post-exam interviews - where I am pretty darn sure 
that what the candidate or student is doing is not what the author or 
instructor meant to convey. And sometimes it is a matter of a poor 
grip on a tool, or an unclear sequence of actions, or a misapplied 
technique due to poor understanding of the conceptual framework on 
which the technique is based, or any one of dozens of misconceptions 
and misapplications that  are easily corrected in the course of 
continuous face-to-face instruction at a residential program that are 
simply not addressed or not even noticed in correspondence courses or 
self-teaching. And all materials with which I am familiar - and that 
includes those published by the PTG (which I have been for the past 3 
years attempting to revise) contain ineffective techniques and flawed 
approaches. They are all based on learning recipes for procedures - 
and not on understanding the underlying concepts, without which 
practitioners have no way of assessing their own work or dealing with 
unexpected issues. To be fair, some of the PTG materials do mention 
the importance of learning the conceptual framework - but then expect 
the student to extrapolate that from the procedures. Not effective... 
I hope to do something about it fairly soon - if I can find the time.

With mentoring the problem is different. All depends on the quality 
of the mentors. In the past couple of years I tested several 
candidates from a specific location all of whom were taught by a 
mentor who appears to be superb. They displayed superior skills. 
Other mentors seem to produce poorer results - and in some cases even 
mislead their students with poor advice. How a beginner in the field 
is supposed to judge the quality of a prospective mentor is an 
insoluble problem...

Over the years I have tested and taught candidates from NBSS, from 
the Western Ontario program, from Israel, South Africa, Japan, China, 
Spain, Norway. And many US-trained candidates who have not had formal 
residential training. Two patterns jump right out:

1. Foreign trained technicians do a whole lot better than US trained 
technicians.
2. NBSS and Western Ontario graduates in general do better than those 
without formal residential training.

I don't know how those foreign technicians were trained, but the 
results speak for themselves. And the graduates of the formal 
training programs in general display a much more confident and 
methodical approach to the exam tasks than many (not all) of the 
others. I have on occasion come across students and candidates 
without formal training who displayed superior skills after a fairly 
short period of self-teaching. My conversations with them usually 
reveal that they have undertaken a very disciplined and methodical 
approach to training themselves - with substantial daily practice 
sessions, not going on to the next task until having mastered the 
previous one, a relationship with several mentors who could serve as 
a check on their progress, etc. In other words, they invested the 
time and effort in themselves to learn the craft properly - often at 
the sacrifice of some income. My conclusion is that a great many 
people who try to teach themselves - whether through correspondence 
courses or other literature - simply do not spend enough time or 
spend the time effectively enough to master the skills. And some who 
do learn a number of skills never develop the underlying conceptual 
framework on which effective practice must necessarily be based.

Disclaimer: Before Paul Revenko-Jones starts squawking, I must say 
that - to my knowledge - I never tested a graduate of the Chicago 
School of Piano Technology, so I can't speak to the quality of their 
graduates' skills.

OK, now to speak of some attempts at remediation. The PTG and some of 
its chapters do offer a great many classes by various superb 
instructors at conventions and special events, some sponsored by 
manufacturers and suppliers - others non-sponsored. Eric Schandall, 
Don Mannino, Rick Baldassin, Richard Davenport, David Betts, Roger 
Jolly are just some of the names that come to mind - people who try 
to provide that conceptual framework which is so often missing. The 
problem here is two-fold - information overload and lack of 
follow-up. It is just very difficult for the average student to 
completely understand and assimilate all that information in the 
course of a continuous two-period session. Or whatever time frame is 
devoted to it at a single event.  And by the time people get home and 
actually get to try it out for real - some of it has already gotten 
fuzzy. This is where a residential program would provide some 
corrective feedback, follow-up, reinforcement - whatever. And the 
information would be presented - to begin with - in more manageable 
portions, with opportunities for follow up in between  - not thrown 
at you all at once, because of the limited time-span of the 
convention or event. Again, some people are able to come away from 
some of those convention classes with that lightbulb lit up and thing 
falling into place - but many do not. As a result I have heard a lot 
of misconceptions and bowdlerized ideas based on what was taught in 
those classes - sometimes even misquoting the source.

Just a simple example. Not too long ago someone vehemently disagreed 
with something I tried to teach, stating that "So-and-so in such and 
such a class said that letoff affects nothing, so how can you say 
that aftertouch can be changed by altering letoff" (let me say that I 
don't recommend this - I just used it as an example of relationships 
within the action) . Of course, "so-and-so" did not say that "letoff 
affects nothing". What he said was "nothing affects letoff" (which is 
true - letoff control is mounted on a rigid rail that never moves 
with relation to the string no matter what else you do to the action 
in the course of regulation short of altering action geometry) Which 
tells me that the person in question misremembered what "so-and-so" 
taught, and did not truly assimilate the basic relationships within 
the action that "so-and-so" was trying to convey - just came away 
with a surface meaning of the words. And I run across stuff like that 
all the time - in classes and in post-exam interviews.

For the past few years several of us in the PTG have been trying to 
develop a methodology to convey this knowledge in a more effective 
manner.  We break the instruction up into more manageable chunks that 
can be more easily assimilated by students and combine it either with 
exercises on jigs and models (for the less experienced students) or 
with actual performance of the procedures - under the supervision of 
experienced instructors. Some of these classes have been offered at 
PTG Annual, State and Regional Conventions, some at chapter-sponsored 
events. I am in the middle of a series of all-day Sunday classes (one 
per month, three months) for the San Francisco Chapter. They do work, 
if the students go home and practice what they learn at the classes. 
Because we do spend a lot of time with each student on an individual 
basis - making sure that they understand and follow what they have 
been taught by correcting any observed technical flaws and missteps 
on the spot. So these classes require a continuous commitment - and 
we do have people who keep coming back and eventually
develop good skills. And they are very resource and labor-intensive, 
and reach a minuscule number of people - compared to the need. And 
the nominal fees which we charge for these are typically supplemented 
by PTG or Chapter subsidies. In effect, the many pay to teach the 
few. At some point aspirants to this profession are going to have to 
realize that effective instruction requires time and resources - and 
it can't all be provided by experienced technicians at their own expense...

I do have to say that some of the discussions on the PTG lists 
(Pianotech, CAUT, ExamPrep) cover some topics quite comprehensively. 
And provide some of that conceptual framework that I keep mentioning. 
And often debunk some misconceptions rife in the trade. But again, 
this is short of personal instruction, where one look, a few words 
and a simple demonstration can correct many errors and increase speed 
or effectiveness. And reaches relatively few people. And is episodic 
in nature. But every little bit helps.

Before someone starts yelping that the PTG Exams 
are  "unrealistically difficult" and "do not reflect real conditions" 
so how can I judge effectiveness of instruction base on them - that's 
nonsense. A well trained, confident technician can cope with any 
situation, as long as he or she understands the basic principles of 
the instrument and the craft,  has a good grasp of tools and 
techniques and has developed fluency through repetition. I have seen 
this again and again. Most recently, a candidate who admitted to me 
beforehand that he never works on vertical pianos and has never in 
his life replaced a vertical shank did quite well on the exam, just 
using his conceptual grasp of the issues involved and overall 
technical skills. (He did have a brief demonstration of vertical 
shank replacement the day before the exam). And I have seen similar 
occurrences before. And the time allowances on the exams are quite 
generous - again judging by the performance of well-trained 
technicians (no matter how they were trained) who usually complete 
the task - and quite well - with about 10-20% of the time still left 
on the clock. I have seen technicians who accidentally broke a part, 
repaired it and still completed the task with a good score within the 
time allowed. If one is fluent in one's craft and has a good 
understanding of underlying issues, one can operate under all kinds 
of pressure and unfamiliar circumstances.  If one's training is too 
narrowly focused merely on following a series of "steps" in specific 
situations, that is not professional-level training, and people whose 
training does not go beyond that do have trouble under pressure. And 
pressure on specific jobs or from specific clients is just as much a 
part of the profession as anything else...

OK, sorry for some of the rambling here, but I hope some of this 
stuff gives a somewhat realistic picture of the pitfalls of trying to 
teach yourself a profession. And they are not insurmountable - all it 
takes is time and commitment and some good contacts... And if you can 
see your way to going to school - do it. It will be worth every 
minute and every penny.

Israel Stein