Meet Ryan Ellison, RPT

A musical family

I like to think my journey into piano technology started at birth. Both my parents were high-school orchestra directors and conductors, so practicing music was a requirement from about age six. I sang in a children's choir, took piano lessons, and at twelve picked up the string bass like my dad. I played it through college, in orchestras, jazz bands and every kind of ensemble under the sun.

After fifteen years of studying and performing, I decided to go in a different direction.

Finding piano tuning

After college I worked at a music store in north Denver and learned to repair woodwinds, brass, guitars, strings and electronics. By 2010 the store was downsizing, and I took a leap of faith on a curiosity: piano tuning. We kept referring tuning calls to local technicians, and when I ran into the Piano Technicians Guild, something clicked. I thought, "I bet I can do this."

So I took my father's amateur tuning tools (which, technically, makes me a second-generation tuner), a guitar tuner and a YouTube video to my family's Baldwin console. Nope! The piano ended up far worse than when I started. You can't learn to tune a piano without formal training.

Chicago

After one very important phone call, I enrolled at the Chicago School for Piano Technology in August 2011. At 26, I left my path as a musician and moved to Chicago, to a school on the second floor of a historic Ukrainian Village warehouse. One rigorous year and more than 1,100 hours of classwork and skills testing taught me aural tuning, regulation and repair.

Starting out in Denver

I launched my first tuning business in Denver in October 2012, sure my old musician friends would send plenty of work. Wrong! I knew guitarists, horn players and drummers, and zero pianists. So I did what every tuner does: pounded the pavement, posted Craigslist ads and called piano stores.

A local piano store owner gave me a chance, long hair and all. His shop sold fine new European pianos and Yamahas, and rebuilt large Steinway and Baldwin grands. Over three years there, I also built a private clientele of about 300 pianos.

West to Los Angeles, and Yamaha

By late 2015 I was heading west. After three hard-fought years building my own business, the LA competition intimidated me, so I looked for a job at a piano store. Two trips later, I had nothing. My last appointment on my last trip was with a Yamaha dealer in Van Nuys, who told me Yamaha was hiring. That was another call I'm glad I made. In December 2015, I started at Yamaha in Buena Park.

There I had to start over, un-learning old habits and learning the Yamaha method from the beginning: unison, octave, fifth, fourth, and a slow-beating temperament. A marvelous technician from Osaka brought projection tuning to the US, and his pianos sounded calm and powerful at once. It changed how I hear a piano.

It all comes full circle. I started with nothing but a tuning lever in my pocket, and now I'm taking everything I've learned back to where it began: just me, my tools and your piano.

Credentials

• Registered Piano Technician, Piano Technicians Guild (2017)
• Grand Piano Master Course, Yamaha Piano Technical Academy, Japan (2019)
• Grand Piano Course, Yamaha Piano Technical Academy, Japan (2017)
• Chicago School for Piano Technology (2012)
• Bachelor of Music (2007)

Specialties: Yamaha grand and upright pianos, Disklavier, Silent and Hybrid pianos, and Bösendorfer pianos.

What I care about: A piano that holds its tuning, feels even under the fingers, and sounds the way it should. I'll tell you plainly what your piano needs, and what it doesn't.