FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Tuning Pianos with Alanna Gurr

The Guelph songstress on touring, the new EP, and tuning pianos.

Walk into almost any music store, and the keyboard instruments there will probably involve digital hardware: synthesizers, organs, digital pianos, MIDI controllers and interfaces, and maybe even a keytar or two. There most likely will not be too many of those stringed, percussive, old-fashioned, made-out-of-wood pianos. Why bang rocks together when you can light a match? Why push a cart over the dirt when you can drive a Segway?

Advertisement

It is a certain kind of person, then, who wants to become a piano tuner in this day and age. You’d have to be excited not about consumer trends or techno-trickery but about resonance—about the collaborative movement of wood and strings and human fingers for the purpose of making music. You’d have to be drawn to tradition and to things in themselves, and you’d have to be patient.

Alanna Gurr fits the bill. She tunes pianos by day in and around Guelph, Ontario, where she also hones her other crafts, singing and songwriting, by night. Gurr’s new LP Late at Night suggests to me that these two sides of her working life aren’t too far apart, either. Her latest batch foregrounds the grains and timbres of flesh-and-blood singers and players: lovely pedal steel, warm chorus singing, thick rhythm guitar, and spartan drumming—not to mention Gurr’s own breathy vocals—are almost touchable here. These are sturdy songs made by callused hands.

Late at Night also features Gurr’s backing band, The Greatest State (Joseph Gallo, Micheal De Paola, and Matt Monoogian), and you can get it over at her bandcamp page. While it downloads, read Noisey’s interview with Alanna Gurr, below, about piano tuning, singing, and craft.

Noisey: So your day job is being a piano tuner? How’d you get into that?
Alanna Gurr: It is! Well, I was doing my undergrad at Western [in London, Ontario] in the Media, Theory and Production program when I decided to move downtown and try to meet some more people. I started going to shows, and there I met some new friends who were starting a women’s jam-thing called “Chutney Sessions.” I met a lot of lovely ladies and a few who happened to be in the Piano Technology program at Western already. I started to hear all about the work they were doing, and I would visit the workshop. I’ve always loved working with my hands and am pretty self-motiviated, so being a piano tuner and owning a small business seemed like a pretty awesome route to take. I applied for the program and since then have been running my small business of piano tuning and repairs in Guelph for three years.

Advertisement

Do you need a crazy-good ear to tune a piano? What’s the process like?
Yes, your ear is trained the more you tune. Apparently you’re not a good tuner until you have tuned 1000 pianos. I use an a440 tuning fork and do equal temperament tunings. It is all by ear and takes about two and a half hours. I also do repair work (regulations, restringing and soundboard repair) and really love that side of things. My dream is to have a shop one day.

What’s the piano-tuning scene like? I imagine it’s an older crowd doing the piano tuning, but I don’t know.
Piano tuning is traditionally a trade passed down from family generations, from my understanding. In school, our class of fourteen ranged from ages 19-52, and at any conferences I’ve been to I am much younger and one of the only ladies there. Sometimes it is frustrating to show up at a tuning and be questioned about my age or gender in the trade, but for the most part it works out in my favour. I have received a lot of nice comments and business from people who are excited to see a young woman in the trades and want to support my business.

Do most tuners play music too? Does that work translate into songwriting at all, or are they completely different musical muscles?
Most piano tuners play music; I think it would be hard not to unless you really thought of tuning as work and nothing but work. The love of instruments is what brought me to tuning and I think that tuning has definitely helped with my singing, as my ear is being trained, but I think songwriting is a whole other muscle. Understanding an instrument and the way it works and the factors that change an instrument are beneficial to performing, for me, but songwriting is a craft and I am still learning on that front.

Advertisement

So, you were performing for a while in London, where you lived, and now you’re based in Guelph. What’s it like being a musician who doesn’t live in Toronto? What’s Guelph like right now?
Guelph is a pretty great city to live in if you have chosen to not live in the giant city of Toronto. It does have its limitations of accessibility, and I sometimes feel very stagnant, but I think for a small city it has so much going on and not only a great community of people and artists who support each other but a supportive audience, too. Not to mention it is much cheaper to live in. For me it feels like the right choice for now; I can have my piano tuning business, which is mostly advertised successfully by word of mouth, and I can afford to live and to make music. When we play a show in Toronto we can still drive home and sleep in our own beds too!

The new record sounds great. What’s it like working with Daniel Romano?
Why, thank you! Daniel Romano was kind enough to do some harmonies and organ playing on our record, which I was very excited about because I love his music and really admire his work. His brother Ian Romano and Kenny Meehan at Tapes and Plates were the engineering masters behind our record, though, and really had a giant hand in how the album turned out, along with my band The Greatest State. I knew how I wanted everything to sound, and I knew from listening to previous records recorded at Tapes and Plates (The Weather Station, Daniel Romano), with the warm instrument tones and detail devoted to vocals, that they would understand that.

Advertisement

Your voice on the new record sounds different than I remember. I always liked your singing, but it sounds more mature or something. Does the voice just age naturally, or does one consciously decide to start singing a bit differently?
I think your voice ages naturally but also grows into your sound. Listening back to my older songs, my voice to me sounds so high and light, and I think that was because I was often nervous and also because I felt it suited the songs. This album was recorded after a year of playing the songs with my band and it is probably the most natural-sounding I have felt. We recorded the vocals on full takes and I only did each song a few times, where with my older album we picked apart and prodded the vocals. So to answer your question, I feel my voice has matured on its own accord, because I am more comfortable with my singing, but also a bit consciously, as I do have a lower range and thought I should gravitate to that side, rather than trying to sing in a range that I can’t control as much.

Do you play with The Greatest State when you do these songs live? How have the shows been going?
I am trying to always play with The Greatest State when we play these songs. We are very much a band now. The guys helped me to shape these songs over the last year or two playing live and were a big part of the outcome of the album, so I don’t like to play without them. Unless I’ve been specifically asked to play solo, I think The Greatest State’s parts are integral to the songs, as I wrote the songs with them in mind. Sometimes it cannot be helped, though, like in the winter when I toured from Winnipeg to Victoria. It is hard to always afford to bring a band on the road. Shows have been going well. I think we are all so comfortable with the material and just really excited to play it together and for an audience.

Advertisement

You must encounter a lot of un-tuned pianos on the road. Are you ever tempted to give them a little tune-up?
fI do encounter a lot of un-tuned pianos on the road. If they are in bars, I often ask if I can leave a card, but most of the time they say they already have a tuner, which it is clear they don’t, or who they don’t employ often enough, which is a shame. If you are going to have a music venue with a piano, which is amazing, why not spend a little bit of money to make your live music sound so much better? It is frustrating sometimes.

Henry Adam Svec is a writer living in Canada. He's on Twitter.

---

[More Guelph talent in Elaquent](http:// http://noisey.vice.com/enca/blog/elaquent-interview-guelph-producer)_

We found a great band in our university town

The Teenage Kicks provide the spoils of youth