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“The forces that make the guitar go out of tune are similar to the forces that make a piano go out of tune. “If you think about every rock or folk concert you’ve gone to, how many times in the course of a concert does a guitarist retune his guitar? They constantly do it,” Mallari said. Pianos need to be tuned before every concert, he said, and sometimes at intermission, too, when the artist requests it. Tuning private pianos in people’s homes makes up about half his tuning work, and the other half consists of tuning pianos in schools, churches and concert venues, including at the University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center and at Sweeney Hall at Smith College. His time is split between restoring pianos in his shop and tuning out on the road, including the Berkshires and all over western Massachusetts. These days, he averages tuning four to five pianos a day in and around the Pioneer Valley, he said. Not to say that the job is easy when he was first starting, tuning a piano could take half a day.
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(That’s also how he took his exams for school and to receive his certification from the Piano Technician’s Guild - tuning by ear - but since getting into the field, he also uses tools for professional technicians to make tuning faster and easier.) He was trained in the North Bennet Street School’s two-year piano technology program in Boston and can tune a piano entirely by ear, starting with a single tuning fork for the first pitch and working his way through the rest of the instrument in just an hour to an hour and a half. In 2013, he built a timber-frame barn that would become his shop for piano restoration, complete with a loading dock, and by 2014, he’d built up enough of a reputation and client base to make piano tuning and restoration his full-time business. Mallari opened his piano tuning business in 2006, when he bought a property and moved to Williamsburg while continuing to work part-time in psychiatry - his former profession of about 15 years. “Music has always been a very important part of my life,” he said. Today, he plays accordion in the band Les Boulevardiers, and upright bass in several orchestras. He’s also a musician and has been playing piano since before he was in elementary school.
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Mallari, who’s originally from Colorado and now runs a business out of his Williamsburg shop on Old Goshen Road, enjoys working with his hands he’s always had a woodworking shop, even while studying as a medical student in Boston. “I’ve always thought it was kind of interesting that with both psychiatry and piano tuning, the most important thing I did was listen,” Mallari said.
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WILLIAMSBURG - Psychiatry and piano tuning don’t have much in common, but they both require a good ear to be successful, according to local piano technician Sean Mallari, who made the switch from the former to the latter years ago.
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