Transcription
If I gave you just three months to learn how to tune pianos, learn how to repair pianos, and start your very own tuning business making at least $50 an hour starting out with potential to make even more in the future, do you think it would be possible?
Well, if you're someone who's interested in learning piano tuning and repair as a part-time or full-time job, or you're just interested in learning a valuable and in-demand skill, then today I'm excited to show you exactly how to do that. In this video, you'll learn:
Number one: How much you can make as a piano tuner. Is it even a good career?
Number two: Three mistakes that stop people from learning how to tune pianos.
Number three: The simple way to become a piano technician that anyone can do.
But first, let's look at who this is for, because it's worth noting that learning to tune pianos is not going to be right for everybody. So, first thing that you must have if you want to learn to tune pianos is patience. Becoming a professional piano tuner won't happen overnight, and it's going to take hard work.
Second, you need to have healthy hearing. You can't learn to tune pianos if you can't hear well, so if you're losing your hearing, sadly, this won't work for you. You don't need to have a good ear or be musically inclined, but just generally healthy. Those are the only two: patience and healthy hearing. Seriously, anyone that has those can learn to do this.
But who am I to tell you about piano tuning stuff, anyway? Well, I'm Josiah Jackson, and you probably know me as the Piano Doctor. There's like a 99% chance that you stumbled on this video after watching another one of my videos from social media. And to be honest, I learned how to tune and repair pianos the hard way. I tried watching YouTube videos, but none of them were any good. I tried reading books, and those were actually really great. I highly recommend that if you were interested in becoming a piano tuner, that you pick up a few books on the subject. But as a visual learner, the books didn't have what it took to actually show me what I was supposed to do.
Later, after getting help from somebody locally, I even went on expensive trips across the US to meet other piano technicians, but it turned out to cost way more money than I expected, and it only lasted a little while. So, why am I telling you this? Well, a ton of you guys have been asking in the comment sections, "What's the best way to learn how to tune and repair pianos?" But I don't want you to go through the same long, expensive journey that I did. I wanted to show you guys a simple, step-by-step way that you could learn to tune pianos and eventually quit your regular job and just enjoy a simpler life where you actually enjoy your work.
So, let's move on to number one: How much can you make as a piano tuner? Now, I made a whole video on how much I made in my first year tuning pianos, so if you want to check that out, it's the very first upload on this YouTube channel. But to really answer that question, I need to bring you back to my junior year of high school. See, here's a picture of me when I was 16 years old, and I was obsessed with two things: playing piano and playing basketball. At the time, I really wanted to join a new school for my senior year because they had a fantastic basketball program. Here was my problem, though: the school was really expensive. It was a private school, and at the time, I did not have enough money to join.
Currently, in the summers, I was working for less than minimum wage at an ice cream shop with a boss who yelled a lot. One day, I'm not even joking, he was literally caught throwing literal hot dogs at the employees. Thankfully, I wasn't there. But even if I worked 10-hour shifts every single day at the job I didn't like, it still wouldn't be enough to pay the cost of tuition, and I thought, "Man, it's just not possible." So, I reached out to the basketball coach and I told him, "Look, I'd love to come play for your school, but I just can't afford it right now." And what he said, as cheesy as it sounds, changed my life. Literally, he said, "Listen, kid, this is your last chance to play high school sports forever. One day you'll get old, and the money it takes to join will seem like a drop in the bucket. If you really want this, you'll find a way to get the money and make it work."
And so, I was determined to show the coach that I really did want this. So I started looking around for ways that I could make enough money to join. And that's when I remembered the old piano in the corner of our living room. See, someone gave us a free piano a while ago, but when we got it, it was really out of tune. So I tried to learn how to tune it from a low-quality YouTube video that was made in like 2014 or something. It was insanely hard to learn because I couldn't find any good information out there, and I spent around 8 hours trying to tune it, and it sounded worse than when I started. Eventually, after a few more brutal tries, I got the piano sounding what I thought was pretty decent. Looking back now, I realize that it was still a bad tuning, and I don't recommend starting the way that I did.
Anyway, all of this happened a few months earlier, and since I really needed money to join the new school, I was curious to see how much you could make by tuning pianos. So I jumped on my mom's computer and Googled "piano tuners near me," and I couldn't believe what they were charging. One guy was charging $40 for a travel fee just to come out, $60 for a pitch raise (which is like if the piano hasn't been tuned in a while), and $180 just to tune the piano. And I had no idea that you can make this much money from tuning pianos. So I called up one of the guys locally and said, "How long does it take you to tune a piano?" He said, "Well, I've been doing this for a few years, it takes me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half." And I literally felt a rush of adrenaline in my head. For a second, I was like, "Dude, I can't believe this guy makes $280 in just a couple hours. I mean, I knew doctors and lawyers made that kind of money, but a piano tuner?"
So I asked him, "Why do you charge so much?" And he answered, "Charging less would overflow my schedule. I'm already turning some people away, and my schedule is still booked to two months out." This got me curious, but I was like, "It can't be like that all over. It's probably just my area." So I called piano tuners across the country, and they all said the same thing: "There aren't enough piano tuners to meet the demand." And that's the moment I decided, "I am going to learn to tune pianos if it kills me." I practiced my piano tunings like crazy throughout my junior year of high school, and then during my senior year, I opened my little piano tuning business to the public.
So during my senior year, I went part-time to school, so my schedule looked something like: one, go to school in the morning; two, get off for a few hours and tune a piano; and then back to school for basketball practice. And that little tuning business did much better than I ever expected. In my first year of tuning, I made over $34,000 with an average pay of nearly $80 an hour, and all this was while I was still in high school. I mean, I know a lot of you guys might think $34,000, well, that's not a lot of money, and you're right. I mean, especially by piano technician standards, this is very little, at least in the US. But you have to understand that this is more money than I had ever made in my entire life combined.
Long story short, I ended up having enough money to join the school and play on the basketball team. And because I ended up having extra money and time left over, I also joined the track team, and the soccer team, and the golf team. I wasn't great at any of them, but I did it just for fun. And the exciting part is, that year was just the beginning. Many piano tuners can make $100,000 a year or more while working three or four days a week, tuning three or four pianos a day. In fact, recently I went to a conference for professional piano technicians, and a guy got up on stage and was talking about how to run a piano tuning business. Now, he was one of the top business guys in the piano tuner world, so the room was full of about 50 or other people, all listening intently. And he said something that kind of blew me away. He said, "If your business is a few years old and you aren't making at least $80,000 a year, you're doing something wrong." And I thought, "There's no way." But the more I've worked in the industry, the more I've realized he's right. There is way too much demand and not enough piano tuners, so making that much a year and more is a real possibility.
Another piano tuner was even quoted saying, "I wish we had more competition. There is an extreme shortage of piano tuners, and it's only going to get worse, and it's worldwide." There are so many examples of people out there just like myself who learned to tune pianos, and it changed their life. One of my favorite examples is actually a comment from one of my subscribers. He said, "Hey, I'm 21 and started tuning full-time for myself since the summer, and it's crazy how fast you grow. Never thought I'd be at three clients a day with no advertising in under a year, not to mention having the time and now the money to do the fun things I want to do." And you don't have to start your own business. There are plenty of chances to work for other people as well.
In fact, a local piano tuner in a city about 30 minutes away from me recently sent me an email saying, "Hey, another piano tuner in my area just retired, and I inherited all of his customers on top of my own. I'm way too busy. Can you help me out? I can pay you $70,000 a year. You only have to work three or four days a week. Can you do it?" And quite frankly, I had to tell him no because I'm already too busy myself. And this is happening all over the United States, and it's even worse in other countries. So, yes, piano tuning is a great career, and there is a big need for it all around the world right now. Seriously though, if you're concerned there isn't enough work in your area, just call up some local piano tuners and say, "Hey, how busy are you guys?" If they're like most piano tuners, they're probably booked out for a while.
That being said, let's move on to number two: Three mistakes that stop people from learning to tune pianos. And these mistakes are more like worries that make people procrastinate on pulling the trigger and saying, "I'm going to be a piano tuner."
Number one: Are there even enough pianos out there to make this a full-time job?
Number two: How will I get customers? I mean, I don't know how to run a business or anything.
Number three: Can I just learn to do this by myself? Where do I even start?
And that's three questions. Don't get overwhelmed. Let's take these one by one. First, are there enough pianos out there to make this a full-time job? And we've looked at this for a bit, but I can't stress this enough because so many people get hung up on it. Now, I find when people do get stuck on this, it's because they have a very small view in mind. They picture tuning for a random mom and dad who want their child to learn, but they aren't that serious about it, so they probably won't get the piano tuned every six months to a year like a manufacturer recommends. And while you do tune for a bit of those people, you have to broaden your scope a little bit and think about elementary schools, and high schools, and colleges. Each of those schools have different rooms with pianos in them, like practice rooms, performance rooms, band classes. All of those pianos are often tuned every six months or so.
Then you have serious piano owners. These are often graduates from music schools or they play for church and want their piano performing the absolute best. And of course, that leads us to churches. Sometimes they have two or three pianos that need to be tuned every three months. That's how often I tune our church's piano, at least. And last but certainly not least, you have performance venues. Those pianos need to be tuned often, before every single concert. Sometimes that means three or four times a week. And quick, I know a great way to get more awesome customers like that is to get certified, and we'll talk more about that later.
And a lot of people say things like, "Well, isn't everybody switching over to electronic pianos?" And while they are growing in popularity quite a bit, they will never take over acoustics because of customers like this. I've had so many clients say, "I could never switch over to an electronic piano because it is just not the same." And the good news is, the people who really care for their pianos are your highest paying customers, and there are so many great pianists out there, but not enough piano tuners to help them out. In fact, in another video, I was talking about the problem of not having enough piano tuners out there to tune all the pianos, and somebody commented and said, "This is totally accurate. I sell pianos for a living, and the biggest bottleneck in the process of getting them sold and delivered is getting them tuned. I'm in a major city with a big music scene, and there are not nearly enough piano technicians. Most have retired or passed away in the last decade, and there are very few young ones to replace them. It's not necessarily an easy job, and there are different levels of piano technicians. If you take it seriously and get good, there is plenty of money to be made. Some of the best make upwards of $1,000 a day."
Now, I know some of you may be thinking, "$1,000 a day? That's crazy. That'll never happen." But think about it. If you bring your car to a mechanic shop in the United States, they'll charge anywhere from $80 to $150 an hour for repairs. Now, piano tuners are much more rare to come by than a car mechanic, and they're in a much more niche category. So if you run your own business and you don't have to pay for cost of employees, cost of parts, for the most part, you just take the money home yourself, you can very easily make that much in a day. And while, yes, $1,000 a day is certainly on the high end, you have to be a great technician in order to do that. I've personally made $600 in a day, and that was before I had my YouTube channel or anything like that.
And you might be thinking, "Well, that's cool, but how am I even going to get customers?" And that leads us to question number two: How will I get customers? Now, there are a thousand ways to grow a business, and it's difficult to go super in-depth on something as general as how to grow a piano tuning business, but I want to give you a quick sneak peek into the best way I've personally found to get your first customers.
Number one: Tell your family and friends. You might be surprised how many tunings you get right off the bat from this. So many people want their piano tuned, they realize that it's out of tune or something's broken, and they've just been procrastinating on it, and they don't know who to call.
Number two: Is to set up a website. There are simple options out there that cost very little, like Weebly. That's how I built my first website in a couple days. Wix, Squarespace, etc. You don't need anything fancy. There are templates out there that you can copy and paste and get your own website running in a couple hours.
Number three: Is set up a Google listing. You know how when you go to Google and type in "find restaurants near me" and a bunch of those red dots show up? Well, there are people out there Googling "piano tuners near me" as well, and if you have a Google listing and are the first person to pop up, they're extremely likely to call you. You can set up a Google listing really easily by going to google.com/business.
Number four: And possibly my favorite way to get new customers is to ask other piano tuners near you if you can have some jobs that they don't want to work on. Personally, I've got a ton of business from this. Often, you won't get the best clients from this, but they're willing to pay, and it's a great way to start out.
Number five: Is word of mouth. Now that you've tuned for other people and you're doing good work, word will spread quickly. You don't have to do any advertising at all. Your business is ready to go.
And now that you're excited about starting your own business, that leads us to the next mistake. People often think, "I can just learn to do this all by myself. I don't need to invest in any education or anything like that." And when I first started, I was in your boat as well. I thought learning by myself would be the cheapest way to go, but the more I've learned, the more I realize that is not the case. Now, like I mentioned before, when I first started learning, I tried learning by myself, and I made expensive mistakes. I did tunings that were not great, and every repair that I did ended up taking three times longer than it should have. By the grace of God, I didn't ruin a nice Steinway grand piano and go bankrupt trying to pay back the owner for it, but I have heard of that happening.
So, if you've ever trusted me before, now is the time. If you want to do piano tuning and repair as a full-time or part-time job, learning from people who have done it before is the best way to go. I mean, after all, there's only so much that you can learn from my short one-minute videos on TikTok or Instagram, for instance. I can't fit the 187 different possibilities for fixing a sticky key in a single video, and there's so much that goes on behind the scenes in my videos where I'm determining, you know, what the problem is before I actually even shoot a video for it.
Now that we've got the basics covered, I'm excited to tell you the best way that you can learn to tune and repair pianos right now. And again, thinking back to high school, I didn't have much money to pay for fancy in-person training. I mean, the cost of going to school for this kind of thing is insane. First of all, very few colleges offer a degree in piano technology, which is piano tuning and repair. And the ones that do require you to have a four-year degree in regular piano performance before you can spend two more years learning how to tune and repair pianos. And so, when I was first looking into this, I calculated the total cost for six years of college, room and board, moving to a different state, and it would be $83,000 absolute minimum. And that number was way too high for me.
So I was looking around for other options that were a lot cheaper to get started. And at this point, I'm going to ask you to imagine something. So, close your eyes if it helps, and I want you to stick with it because there's a point. Imagine you wanted to teach 100 people to replace broken windows for a living, but there's a problem. All of these people live in different places in the country. So you tell everybody, "I'll fly you out here for a few months, I'll pay for room and board, and you can watch me replace some windows, and I'll teach you along the way. I just need a deposit of $15,000." Well, not many people would pay you $15,000 to teach them how to replace windows. So what could you do to make it easier and cheaper for them to learn this technical skill?
Well, what if you made super high-quality, in-depth tutorials that covered every situation for replacing windows? What if you gave them hands-on assignments and worksheets and tests, all of which they could do at home? What if they could get certified through your program and start their own window replacement business? And the best part is, people could buy it for a fraction of the cost because you don't have to be there in person to teach them. You just give them the certification course. And by now, you might know where I'm going with this, but wouldn't it be nice if there was something like that for learning to tune pianos?
Well, I found something that does exactly that. It's not my own certification program, but these teachers are genuinely much better technicians than me. I mean, I'm only 20 years old, and I'm still learning myself. So I'd like to introduce you guys to the Piano Technician Academy. They're the only fully online piano tuning course in the world, and you can get professionally certified through their program. And this is not your typical online course from somebody that doesn't know what they're doing. See, the Piano Technician Academy used to train people in person, but many of those people who were interested in it couldn't sign up because they charged way too much. And the cost was so high because they hired the best instructors to teach each of their students individually. But over time, they started realizing they were teaching the same things for each student again and again.
So here's what they did. A lot like our imaginary window replacement scenario, instead of training each person individually, they recorded all of their lessons. And now each of the students could watch the lessons as many times as they wanted. They also included written worksheets and PDFs, and hands-on assignments and tests and final exams. And this trained the complete beginner students to become fully certified technicians, ready to go out in the field, start making at least $50 an hour. And the best part is, you don't need tens of thousands of dollars to get started. You have world-class instructors at your fingertips that you can... I've mentioned this a few times, but you can rewatch those videos or go through that lesson as many times as you want, and you don't have to ask your instructor, "Hey, could you go over that again for me real quick?"
More benefits are that you can study at home on your own schedule. For instance, if you don't want to work Fridays, you just don't log on to the certification course that day. Or if you're already working a full-time job and you have 30 minutes to an hour to spend here or there, random times throughout the day, then this is perfect for you. And possibly the best benefit of all is that it's much cheaper than going to a school in person. And if you want more info on pricing, click the link in the description. But if you're interested in enrolling in the certification program or you just want more info, click the link in the description and use the code "thepianodoctor" for $100 off of your enrollment. There's also a lot more in-depth info on what they actually teach in the certification program if you click that link.
But before I go any further, I know I have to mention this because everybody's already thinking it. Yes, I do get a small commission from the Piano Technician Academy to support their certification program. But honestly, I believe that this is the best way to get started in the industry right now. I'm actually currently taking their course, and I'm blown away with how much value you get compared to how much they charge. And this is the only online school that I recommend right now. There are other schools out there that are great at teaching in person. In fact, if you can afford it, I highly recommend a school in Boston called North Bennett Street School. They aren't paying me anything to mention them here, but they're a two-year trade school for piano tuners. In particular, it's really expensive to live in Boston for two years and pay for tuition to the school, but if you can afford it, I have only heard great things about that school, so I would highly recommend going there.
I've never done a sponsorship or endorsement on this channel to date. So if you want to support me so that I can keep making videos, please use the link in the description with the code "thepianodoctor" for $100 off of the Piano Technician Academy. And I mentioned I would talk about this at the beginning of the video. If you aren't sure if you want to be a professional piano tuner yet, and maybe you just want to try tuning your own piano to see if you enjoy it, I would definitely recommend checking this video out right here where I show you how to get a basic level tuning without breaking the bank.
If you have any questions at all about starting a piano tuning business, growing your own piano tuning business, what's the best way to learn, any questions related to that, feel free to leave a comment under this video. This is the only video where I'm going to try and answer every single question. I'm going to attempt to, at least. If it gets too many comments that it just might not be manageable, but I'm going to try my hardest to answer every single one of them. Other than that, thank you so much for watching, and I will see you on the other side.