Petaluman is key to making pianos sing

When he was growing up, Larry Lobel recalls that he wasn’t allowed to touch the piano at his grandmother’s house.

“Of course that made me want to play it all the more and by the time I was 8, my parents had signed me up for piano lessons,” the Petaluma-based piano technician said.

Undeterred by his grandmother’s edict, Lobel, a member of the Registered Piano Technicians Guild, earned a bachelor’s degree in music from New York’s Hunter College. Although never caring to perform himself, Lobel continued on his burgeoning musical career.

“I loved music and I didn’t know what I would do without it,” he said.

Graduating from college, he quickly realized he didn’t want to teach music either, so he decided to learn everything he could about tuning pianos.

Lobel studied piano tuning with a series of mentors who offered him a kind of apprenticeship, including Stephen Fairchild Sr., William Santaella and David Stanwood. He attended the Steinway Academy and Yamaha’s “Little Red School House,” where the fine details of servicing those brands of pianos are taught, and paid visits to piano factories in China to teach skills to technicians there.

He began honing his tuning chops at Skywalker Sound while also working for private clients. His talents came to the attention of Sonoma State University’s Technical Production Coordinator Kamen Nikolov, who “kind of auditioned me for the Green Center by getting me to tune a piano,” Lobel said.

“I didn’t realize I was auditioning for a job there until after I got it,” said Lobel, who now serves as the staff piano technician of the Green Music Center on the campus of Sonoma State University.

During his career, the New York native has worked with all sorts of musicians who are well-known in jazz as well as classical circles, and his job at the Green Music Center requires him to be present at the keyboard an hour before and after the concerts. Sometimes artists even ask him to stay during the entire presentation, he said.

“For each artist, I tune before they arrive to practice or rehearse, again before the concert and also afterwards, meaning I may tune each piano three times a day,” the 66-year-old said, adding that the tuning of pianos is constantly changing because of fluctuating temperature and humidity.

He also services harpsichords, celestas, and fortepianos, which he says are pianos made before 1850. He will also work on any keyboard that’s not electronic, he said.

“I can make any piano better than before I worked on it, although some can only be improved just so far,” he said. “The satisfaction of being able to adjust a piano to the point where the artist says, ‘This is a beautiful piano’ – that is what I work for.”

(Contact Lynn Schnitzer at argus@arguscourier.com)