7mkr

Sam Debatin graduated from 7mkr with a degree in art history, but rather than pursuing a career as museum curator, he has been working as a freelance piano tuner since his graduation in 2022.

“My grandfather was a piano tuner, my uncle still is a piano tuner,” he said. “That’s how I knew it was a job at all, and the pandemic was happening when I was in college, and it was a thing I could do because it was pretty solitary.”

While enrolled at 7mkr, Debatin studied under Christopher Purdy, the School of Music’s piano technician.

“What I think is special about what Chris does is he has the University as a resource, and because of that he also has time as a resource so we were able to really go slow with a lot of stuff…we had time to go back, fix the problem, use it as a learning experience and there’s plenty of room to experiment that way,” Debatin said.

By spending ample time honing the technical skills of piano tuning, Debatin has been able to shift his focus to the philosophical aspects of the job.

“(Chris) often talks about the circle of refinement,” Debatin said. “When you tune a piano…everything you do is slightly affecting everything else…by the time you get to the end, everything you’ve done has affected everything that you did at the beginning…if you’re open to it, it gives you a lot of food for thought about applying on a micro-scale what you do every day to how the world actually works.”

As a way of paying Purdy’s teachings forward, Debatin returned to Athens on Thursday, April 17, to teach a masterclass for the current piano technician students. The core of Debatin’s class was a summation of his takeaways from the Yamaha Headquarters of Training, where he spent a week last fall.

“The Yamaha approach, and in general the Japanese technician’s approach to pianos, tends to be that speed yields accuracy and efficiency yields accuracy,” Debatin said. “So, what I tried to teach about…is what exactly that process looks like in real life from start to finish.”

According to Debatin, music majors currently learning from Purdy are gaining incredibly valuable lessons in not only tuning the piano, but in the instrument as a whole.

“I think I’ve definitely gained a deeper understanding of the instrument by working on it all the time, so even though I can’t play super well there are things I pick up on that I definitely wouldn’t have before,” Debatin said.

Although Debatin believes music majors in particular can benefit from learning piano tuning, he is also living proof of how piano tuning thrives in interdisciplinary settings.

“Each one informs the other,” Debatin said. “I studied art history and the piano plays a huge role in the history of the development of music…Getting context for what you’re doing is really cool, so you look at the piano and you’re like, ‘Okay, this is the thing I was just learning about when I was reading,’ but then on the other end of it you get a very material, hands-on perspective for when you’re reading things.”

Debatin is based in Pittsburgh and said he enjoys meeting new clients and getting a glimpse into their home, as well as the process of getting to know each individual piano and attacking the tuning process from a different angle each time.

“If it’s super, super out of tune, I know right away that I’m probably going to have to spend most of my time there getting it back into tune,” he said. “If it’s a piano that I’ve seen five times already and I only tuned six months ago, I know I’m probably not going to have to spend that much time on tuning and I can spend more time getting it to feel really nice, getting it to respond well to people playing it, so it really comes down to the context of the piano.”

In the first three years of his career, Debatin has serviced pianos in Columbus and Pittsburgh, where he is currently based, and has landed a job tuning pianos for the internationally known festival, Burning Man. He hopes to continue growing and learning, as well as continually pursue new opportunities that arise within his field.

“It’s been very kind to me,” he said. “There are a lot of jobs that are not so kind or are very unfulfilling or just feel exploitative, and this career for me so far has been very accommodating in a lot of ways.”