“I wasn't happy with my students' progress or the instructions I was giving them, so I created my own. What happened next blew my mind.”
Mark Cerisano
Founder, International Piano Technicians School
Piano tuning instruction has been broken for over a century.
Students have been given vague instructions, told to practise for years, and expected to somehow discover for themselves what their teachers could not clearly explain. We accepted that as normal. That ends here.
I first experienced the problem as a student.
When you inquired about studying my piano tuning method online, I wanted to give you a little introduction to it.
When I started learning to tune pianos, I was frustrated a lot. Piano tuning is still taught much the same way it was over 100 years ago. This old-school method has teachers giving instructions in a vague way and then expecting the student to go away and tune for years, internalizing the procedures until their tunings sound passable.
Some students get lucky. Maybe they are musically gifted. Maybe they are some kind of aural genius. Their results become exceptional, but they are the very few. For most students, the instructions they are taught only work some of the time, and they are expected to learn by intuition what those instructions really mean over years, even decades of practice.
As a student
I was too willing to accept my own confusion. Like most students, I assumed I simply needed more time, more practice, and more experience.
As a teacher
When my students began asking the same questions I had asked, I could no longer dismiss the problem. We are often too lenient when it is only us who is struggling. I was not willing to be that lenient when my students were depending on me for answers.
Teaching exposed what the old system could not explain.
I was trained as a mechanical engineer. We work with formulas and procedures that are precise and accurate, which is why this ancient system was never good enough for me.
As a tuner, I stumbled along reasonably well. But it was not until I started teaching others to tune that I became truly frustrated, and embarrassed. Students were asking me questions I simply could not answer, and I did not want to give them the same answer I had heard so many times when I was learning:
At first, I had been willing to tolerate unanswered questions when they were only my questions. But when my students began asking those same questions, I realized the problem was not the students. The problem was that our profession had accepted a teaching system that left too many important questions unanswered.
These are not obscure questions. They are the questions serious students ask every day.
Yet the traditional system still has no precise and accurate answer for many of them.
I stopped accepting tradition as proof.
I used my engineering training to break down every instruction, test every assumption, and find out what actually worked.
Break down the instruction
I examined each traditional instruction separately instead of accepting broad rules that were difficult to define or repeat.
Design experiments
I created experiments and studies to prove or disprove the assumptions piano tuners have made for the last 150 years.
Build a complete system
I combined what worked with powerful techniques used by a small number of master tuners to create a system based on understanding rather than guesswork.
Many of the things I had been taught did not work all the time. Some did not work at all.
Along the way, I discovered powerful techniques, some of which had existed for decades but were used by only a very small number of master tuners. I used those discoveries to develop what I believe is the easiest and most powerful aural tuning system ever developed.
I do not say that simply because it is my system. I say it because of the results I see my students getting.
The results came faster than anyone expected.
Stephen Struwve
After 42 hours of instruction, Stephen was evaluated by an independent concert technician as a concert-level tuner, something that often takes years or even decades using traditional methods.
Carroll Stevens
Carroll impressed a group of international classical musicians when he tuned for their classical music festival after only one year.
Simon Fox
Simon, a recording engineer and producer, became so confident that he has been known to send concert technicians home and tune his studio pianos himself using this system.
The breakthrough was not just better tuning. It was understanding.
Their comments are not only about the results they achieved. They speak about having their questions answered, feeling confident in their tunings, and enjoying the training.
Students deserve to have their questions answered.
The reason I developed this system was not to create concert tuners. It was simply to answer students' questions. The concert-level tunings were an unexpected result.
For over a century, we have accepted the idea that students should spend years answering questions their instructors could not answer. I do not believe that is how any profession should be taught.
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