“I had a craving to be a symphony tuner,” says Guggenheim. Now he focuses solely on tuning his private clients include homeowners on North Haven, Squirrel Island, and “every inhabited island in Casco Bay,” as well as organizations such as Portland Ovations, PORTopera and the Portland Symphony Orchestra (PSO)-which launched him as the house tuner at Merrill Auditorium. He also rebuilt them in his shop, which at one time employed six people. “It’s all about the wood.”īefore he moved to Maine in 2003, Guggenheim tuned pianos in and around Boston. “Yamaha and Steinway-the top two piano makers in the world-are so particular about their soundboards,” says Guggenheim. “When you press a key, the damper that keeps the string quiet first lifts, then the hammer strikes the string, sending the frequency through the bridge and into the soundboard-the belly of the piano.” The soundboard, a panel made of spruce and crowned in the center to create tension, is what amplifies and distributes the piano’s sound. “You’ve got the wire that leaves the tuning pin, rises up over the bridge, crosses the bridge, and goes down to the hitch pin,” he says, running his hands over the inner workings of a gleaming Steinway grand. Listening to Guggenheim explain how pianos work makes it clear that despite many years of lessons, I know nothing about the instrument. If there’s any kind of bad experience, it lands on me.” “A piano doesn’t just have to sound nice, it has to feel nice. “If the artist moves their body on the bench and you hear ‘creak,’ it gets everybody’s attention.” He also checks the lid, the legs, and the wheels on a concert piano’s dolly system, especially if the instrument is a rental. “Especially with classical music, silence is critical,” Guggenheim explains. Every piano needs regular tuning, but concert tuning involves more than making sure the instrument sounds the way it should. ![]() Pianos go out of tune because of changes in humidity or temperature, being moved, or even because they’ve been played particularly hard. ![]() My goal is to make sure that their attention is solely on the music, not on ‘what’s going on with these keys over here?’ and ‘what’s that noise?’” “It’s my job to get that piano to a place where there are going to be no surprises. “I prepare a piano for someone who does nothing but play,” Guggenheim says. When musicians like Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett and Melissa Etheridge perform at Thompson’s Point or the Maine State Pier, if an acoustic piano is involved, Guggenheim is called in to tune it. Technical skill and decades of detailed piano knowledge have made him the go-to piano technician for the Merrill Auditorium, the State Theatre, and numerous other venues around the state. Today, Guggenheim’s tools are a special wrench, a trained ear, and a $1,000 app, the Reyburn CyberTuner. “But that piano turned out to be a blessing.” “I basically destroyed the piano trying to fix it,” he says. So Guggenheim, then 12, took the whole thing apart with a Craftsman socket set. But he was frustrated with the inferior sound coming out of the piano in the Bridgewater, New Jersey, home where he grew up. The youngest of seven children in a musical family, Guggenheim loved to play. ![]() Matt Guggenheim’s first attempt to tune a piano did not go well. Matt Guggenheim keeps pianos in shape for local musicians and visiting stars.
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