I m interested to learn piano tuning but sad to say it's hard to find any schools or centres that teach the skill in my country.. recently one piano company replied and will need me to join them as apprentice to learn the skill...they need me to go for an interview. And my doubts are do i need any knowledge or be skilled in this trade in the first place. What do they need to see in me before considering i am the suitable person for them? meanwhile i ve not joined any school and will try to read up more...

The main requirements are an acute ear and a deft pair of hands. Tuning pianos is all about compromise - being able to hear the "beats" you get when two notes are almost but not quite in tune with each other, and being able to set intervals so that the frequency of those beats is even through the instrument. (I'm not talking about octaves here - they should be completely in tune! - but the piano is tuned in equal temperament, a compromise tuning which makes all the intervals within an octave very slightly out of tune) The deft hands are needed to adjust tuning levers, but also for fiddling with the mechanism in general, as piano tuners also undertake other maintenance work, like string replacement, or even fixing bits of the hammers or dampers. I could imagine that it might take a little while to learn how all of the bits of a piano fit together. My husband is a harpsichord technician, and also is able to tune pianos and fortepianos, but pianos take him longest to do because they are under much more tension than harpsichords, and each time you adjust a string you then have to play that note very loudly to settle the string into its new position. Being able to do that evenly across the compass of the instrument must take some learning!
Good luck with your researching, and all the best if you do decide to make this your career. A good tuner is worth his/her weight in gold!

Hi, I am a full-time piano tuner !
I live in Belgium, where there are no schools for piano-tuners neither.
So five years ago -- at the time I was doing water analyses in a lab, and wanted to change -- I read an advert from a piano company. They just asked if I had some (basic) knowledge of music, and if I was really motivated to learn the job. They would let me try a couple of times, to evaluate how I would be getting on with it. One of their tuners showed me how to do it (with a machine), and then watched me trying to tune a part of a piano. In the beginning, it's not easy at all; you really have to learn how to manipulate those tuning pins; it takes 3 or 4 hours to get a piano finished, and the results of these first tuning attempts are never brilliant. But my future collegue thought my bungling wasn't that bad for a beginning, and I was accepted. I had a 6 month training in the shop's workplace: besides much tuning practice, I learned also how to do some maintenance and repair works, like replacing broken strings, bimsing hammer felt, regulation, voicing, ...

Whatever you do, dont let my dad try to teach you...*shakes head miserably*

**Thanks*everybody for sharing with me and Anacrusis ,yr good wishes

Would you have to have perfect pitch to tune Pianos???

Nope - often these days it's done with the help of a machine. And even those who don't use machines basically I think use a tuning fork and then use the beats to tune the rest of the piano, as far as I understand it. My piano tuner tunes my piano very slightly flat because the strings are so old and it's taking several tunings to get it back up to pitch without snapping anything! I know he does it by ear not machine, and it would be horrendous trying to tune a whole piano a little flat if you had perfect pitch!

No.
If piano tuners must have perfect pitch,
there'll be so few piano tuners around.

my dad is a piano tuner, he doesn't have perfect pitch, and isn't musical, he doesn't even use an electronic tuner, but he's still the best tuner i know! (not that i'm bias... ) he uses a set of tuning forks, and then uses his ear.

Yup, that's how my tuner tunes pianos.

And mine. He's amazing! Took him just over an hour - explaining to me as he went along too as it was the frst time I had seen it done. He used one tuning fork initially, tuning the ocatave and then going back and checking the A and it was spot on!

He did say something about if you had perfect pitch tuning pianos would not be easy because it is tempered... so much of it would sound out of tune to someone with perfect pitch even when they had finished. He said he learned from someone with absolute pitch, so I guess it is possible!

I heard that the pay you earn for being a apprentice piano tuner is quite low..and what is it like?