Autobiography

During the last decades of his life Virgil Smith became one of the most respected concert piano technicians in the United States, as well as a teacher of tuning whose classes were typically filled to overflowing. In this book, he describes his unlikely path to this second career after an early focus on musical performance in violin and piano, which led to an academic position at Moody Bible College. While at this institution, dissatisfaction with the tuning of the piano in his teaching studio inspired him to tune it himself. Soon after, he was moonlighting as a tuner for radio stations, performance venues and piano teachers.

Quickly discovering that he would need skills beyond tuning in order to satisfy his customers, so he set about to learn how to voice, regulate and provide other piano services. His Autobiography is filled with anecdotes about his quest to become a comprehensively trained piano technician, while he sought to refine his tuning skills to the highest possible degree.

In writing about his own life, he also documented important aspects of the profession of piano technician in the second half of the twentieth century - how skills were learned, what resources were available – as well as some of the organizational history of the Piano Technicians Guild.

The Autobiography itself is supplemented by three major appendices. Two of them are texts by Virgil Smith on the topic of tuning: a short book called New Techniques in Superior Aural Tuning that recently went out of print, and a manuscript intended to replace that book that had not quite reached publication stage when he passed away in 2012. The third appendix is a compilation of an extraordinary discussion concerning Smith's more controversial ideas about tuning that appeared in the pages of the Piano Technicians Journal between Virgil Smith, Journal editor Ed Sutton and Dan Levitan.