“The notion of a piano that just needs a tuning is as foolish a notion as 'it just needs an oil change.'”
          One thing you quickly notice when talking to Andrew Vincitore is that he often compares his profession to auto maintenance.
          “You have to approach the business from pretty much every perspective. That includes tunings, which are like the piano oil changes.  It's a very basic, routine procedure once you know how to do it, and that's what pianos require most often.”
          “There are a lot of tuners that can do a really great tuning, but if they have the smallest, slightest mechanical problem with a piano, they don't know how to deal with it.  That's the guy that knows how to do a tune up, but doesn't know how to do a fine alignment, or how to fix anything else with the car.  And I don't think that's very useful.”
          “Anyone who knows anything about cars knows that if the car has been in grandma's garage for the last 15 years, when she parked it when she quit driving, and now it's time to do something with the car, you're not just gonna charge the battery and drive the car.  And a piano's the same way.”
          “I don't do the very top stuff.  That's a specialty.  I call those the Ferrari mechanics. And if you're a Ferrari mechanic, you don't work on Chevys.  I'm the guy on the corner that fixes anything that anyone rolls in.”
          Andrew Vincitore (whose name is pronounced Vince-it-or) has been working on pianos his whole life.  As a child, he worked in his father's piano store.  Now 46, he works on his own as an independent contractor to the family business, which is still in operation.
          There is a certain romantic notion about piano tuners.  They have a special mysterious skill that common folk lack.  They come into your home, and spend an hour or two in your living room, healing the instrument’s injured strings.  For some reason, the cable guy doesn’t garner the same mythical status.
          In his own living room, with his own piano open for tuning, Vincitore shed some light on the life of a piano tuner.  Big and bald, with a Carnegie sweatshirt and a soft and friendly voice, he spent two hours explaining the profession, as methodically as he would fix a piano.
          “When you adjust the tension in the strings, on most notes on the piano, you're going to set a base pitch, a base specific frequency, then you're going to aurally align three strings for each note for most of the scales of a piano.”  Like most professions, piano tuning has its own language.  “Every piano sound is based on A440.”  A440 is the international standard that says that the A note above middle C is a 440 hertz tone.  It's the sound you hear at the beginning of a concert when the orchestra is tuning their instruments.
          When you open a piano, you see upwards of 200 parallel strings, each one connected to an adjustable pin just above and behind the keyboard.  In every tuning, each of those pins needs to be adjusted.  It’s like stretching and flicking an elastic band; if the string is tightened, the note becomes higher; if it is loosened, it becomes lower.  Most notes have three strings, some low notes have two.  Starting at the baseline A note, Vincitore isolates one of its three strings by placing a thin strip of rubber on the other two.  He strikes the key.
          You might expect that an experienced piano tuner, who learned the trade from his father over three decades ago, would have a traditional approach towards piano tuning.  Not so: Vincitore takes a Hewlett Packard palmtop computer out of his pocket.  “I consider myself a high-tech tuner,” he says.  The device, which is the same variety a businessman might use to schedule his meetings on, tells him if a given note is sharp or flat.  It’s as good as having perfect pitch, he claims.  In the mythical world of piano tuning, he’s more a utility-belted Batman than Superman.  “Electronics represent about 25 percent of the job.  And if you have that, the rest of it is the physical manipulating of the piano.”
          He hits the key.  The lines wave to the left, it's flat.  He laughs.  “My own piano, of course, it being a shoemaker’s shoes situation, my piano actually needs tuning.” He takes out his custom-made tuning hammer, which resembles a fancy wrench, and turns the pin an imperceptibly small amount, maybe a degree or two.  The PDA's screen blinks, and the string is tuned.  He then removes the rubber mute from one of the other strings, and again hits the key, this time listening.  The key hits both strings.  If the second string is tuned correctly, he will hear a clear A note.  Instead, he hears dissonance.  It sounds like two people humming, trying to sound the same note, but coming only close.  Vincitore adjusts the second string, and repeats the process with the third.  After that, there are 87 more notes.  “It's lather, rinse, repeat.”  The whole process takes less than an hour.
           “You're a mechanic,” he says, “but you really got a unique situation because you're going into people's homes.  Things can get very odd.  We're talking about artists very often.  Because musicians and artists are individualist, they do not necessarily live conventional lives.”  He's tuned pianos in mansions, houses built into the sides of cliffs, and artificial islands in Ashrams in the Catskills.  “You always go into it with a very tolerant mind, because there are people out there who are very odd.”
          “This happened the other day.  Arrangements were made for me to go up to this person’s weekend house in Clinton Corners. A very fashionably redone farmhouse.  Everything’s beautiful inside.  And they have a beautiful old piano, a European piano called Grotrian-Steinweg. The backdoor is left unlocked for me, there’s nobody in the house, I walk in, and I’m not uncomfortable in those circumstances because I do it all the time.  Very often people will leave stuff on top of the piano, and display things on a grand piano, but I need to open the lid to work on the piano.  So when I walked in, this was on the piano.”  He takes his PDA out and brings up a picture of what appear to be some sort of animals.  “Upon closer inspection, I realized I had to take this stuff off.  Those are dead. Taxidermy?  I don’t know.  Call it art, call it whatever you want.  But such is my experience that while I was amused, I wasn’t shocked.  And as I’m walking out, this is the island in the kitchen.”  He brings up another picture.  “And there’s this thing, and it’s a bag of prosthetic limbs, in a basket, on the counter in kitchen.  I came home and showed my girls and said, ‘Well girls, it’s just another day in the piano business.’”
          “The other aspect of this is piano technicians are not conventional people.  You get some real loners,” Vincitore says delicately.  “One of the reasons they work independently is because they don't fit in well, so you get some odd ducks.  Prior to my taking on all the store responsibility, we had a guy, a nice man, a very gentle soul he certainly was.  But he looked like Charles Manson.  The beard, the hair.  More than once we'd get a phone call from a customer saying, 'I'm not letting this guy in my house!'  You get some quirky individuals.  And then you get guys who are outright crooks.  There’s a local guy who’s like that and I constantly run into his work.  It’s very disheartening because it bring the trade down.  I don’t want to be associated with that level of stuff.  I don’t want people to think that that’s what piano technicians are.”
          Vincitore is a history buff, and his favorite subject is Andrew Carnegie.  His house is adorned with Carnegie books and relics.  His 1904 Mason & Hamlin upright piano, prominently located in the living room, was once owned by James Bertram, Carnegie's personal secretary.  One day, Vincitore got a phone call from someone executing an estate in Westchester to look at an old piano, and when he went down to the house, it turned out that the deceased woman was Bertram's daughter.  He instantly decided to buy the piano, and with it, a cache of correspondences between Mrs. Carnegie and Mrs. Bertram, including one letter with Andrew Carnegie's signature.  “There's no limit to the coincidences that you run into in life, coming out of the piano world.”
          The profession's idiosyncrasies has some upsides.  During the summer, he often is hired to tune pianos at performance venues, where he works for the full day of a concert.  Since he's technically a member of the stage crew, he gets fed.  And at the end, he gets to stay for the show. He once bartered a deal with the swanky Mohonk Mountain House to tune their pianos in exchange for his family staying for the weekend.  That's not the only time he's coupled his job with a vacation: piano work has taken him to Maine, Florida, Boston, and Annapolis, among other places.
          Andrew Vincitore is built like a car mechanic, which comes in handy when he's hired to move a piano.  Never a solo endeavor, moving a piano can be difficult.  A recent move from an apartment building required him and his crew to wedge a piano into an elevator, since the instrument was larger than the door.  “There have been many a times when I've been pushing a piano up a flight of stairs and wishing my father had been a florist.”
          Still, he is a man who decidedly enjoys his profession.  “When all your ducks are in a row, it can be a wonderful job.  If you do all your preparation and your route planning and your appointment scheduling and you know your geography, and you know the pianos you're working on, it can be wonderfully mindless.”  On a relaxed day, he'll do two or three tunings, and be home by two o'clock to be with his wife and three children.  “It's a great job for family men.”
          Vincitore himself is not much of a musician, which he sees as good for his business: “If you're really a fine musician, being a piano technician may not be a good choice because your own demands and idiosyncrasies as a musician may limit your ability to understand a piano for what it is.”  Although he plays a little bit of piano, guitar, and clarinet, he says it's his dad who was the big musician in the family.  Joe Vincitore built the Vincitore name playing in clubs six nights a week for decades, accumulating a network of people that would come to him for music advice.  This led to his opening of a piano shop in Poughkeepsie, where young Andrew first learned the ropes, apprenticing on all the old cheap pianos that would come in.
          “My father used to say, if you've tuned a thousand pianos, you call yourself a piano tuner.  You could learn technically how to do it, but to execute it with finesse in a practical amount of time, it takes a long time.”  Over his career, Vincitore has tuned his fine motor skills, and, more importantly, his problem-solving ability.  With years of work, he says, you start to learn to check things like the picture frame on the wall for the mysterious buzzing sounds, rather than the piano.  “My old auto shop teacher used to say, check the stupid stuff first.  He used to tell us many a valve job has been done on an engine because of a bad distributor cap, which is a five dollar part.”
          Auto mechanic comparisons aside, Vincitore really considers his job to be special.  “I'm not an appliance repairman.  You're fixing something that adds beauty to people's lives.  Yes, you're a mechanic, but you're adding a dimension to their life that they wouldn't otherwise have.”  And unlike the cable guy, his work doesn’t rot the brain.