PIANO TUNING KAUAI PIANO TUNING PIANO REPAIRS KAUAI ON ISLAND PIANO SERVICE

A PIANO KEYBOARD is a virtual array of potential, a floating, still lake surface, waiting to be plunged into. The pianist’s hands caress and smash, thus soft and loud, thus PIANO-FORTE. Shadows and highlights, staccato and long dying sustains are all available.

All moods can be evoked when the instrument is in balance. I offer my services to help you achieve harmony with your piano.

I have 41 years of experience working on grands and uprights, squares, players, pump organs and harpsichords.

ADVICE FREELY OFFERED!

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Kaua‘i piano tuner keeps the music sweet by Anne E. O’Malley

“I think I have the perfect job, says Mark Taylor, piano tuner. “I’ve always had a love of music and an interest in mechanical things and machines and working on pianos combines both.” 

He’s tuned pianos played by musical greats — who wouldn’t want him on their tuning team, what with 35 years in the business? 

OK, there was ONE time that it wasn’t that great. Tuning a piano for a concert at the San Francisco Opera, Taylor learned he was disturbing the nap of tenor Luciano Pavarotti — but how was he to know? — until Pavarotti sent someone to stop him. 

Taylor has tuned pianos used by Van Cliburn, Chick Corea, Roger Williams, Marian McPartland, Tony Bennett and more. 

Once, Kaua`i resident and composer/musician Toni Childs had a piano moved from the wood of Ha`ena to an outside stage in Kapahi where she performed. She hired Taylor to tune the piano once it was returned to its home and he needed a hitch in a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get there. 

While living in the Bay area, he tuned Dave Brubeck’s son’s piano used in an intimate concert for 120 people. 

“He’s one of the first people who turned me onto jazz,” Taylor says of Brubeck. 

Taylor took a college degree in industrial environmental design and one of the first jobs offered to him was a gig designing vacuum cleaners. He turned it down and instead, went to work for a piano shop in Rochester, N.Y., then moved to New Orleans where he became the Steinway technician for the city’s performing arts center —and by the way, he does the tuning here for the Kaua`i Performing Arts Center piano. 

Steinway is the numero uno name in concert pianos and among the pianists who played the one in New Orleans that Taylor tuned was world-renowned pianist Emanuel Ax. 

Taylor, who’s been tinkling the ivories since the age of 12, and working on pianos pretty much since then, says, “I played piano pretty well, but not at that level. To hear your [tuning] work turned into concert level performing made me appreciate the importance and responsibility of what I was doing.” 

Mark Taylor Piano Service offers tuning, repair and appraisal. He’s a walking compendium of information on the subject of pianos — and that comes in handy when he calls on Kaua`i clients to tune their pianos. 

Taking the sound range of a piano from a whisper to the sound of thunder is his job. 

“A well-regulated piano makes that happen,” he says. “There are 10,000 parts in a piano and they must be in proper relationship with each other to produce the best feeling of the keys, allowing you to play softly without a note missing and also to have full volume when the music calls for it.” 

Taylor gives recommendations to clients on how to keep their pianos in tune as long as possible. 

“Since a piano is a musical instrument as well as a piece of furniture, it requires thought as to placement in a room because a piano breathes and changes with the variations in humidity,” he says. He adds, “The heart of the piano, the soundboard, shrinks and expands, and this is the major factor in the tuning stability.” 

Most of Taylor’s jobs these days seem to be clients who’ve inherited family pianos that they want to get into shipshape for their children to play. Taylor, one of 28 grandchildren, inherited his grandmother’s piano and says, “I took it as a sign to be doing the work.” 

Taylor makes house calls and suggests people thinking of buying new pianos or tuning old ones book a house call from him first. They could save themselves a bundle of time and money in the long run. 

Taylor may be reached at 651-3850 or marktaylor@hawaii.rr.com .