12/27/2024
I hate interviews. I get really nervous because they normally feel like an interrogation rather than a conversation...
however, this reporter (I wish I could remember her name) was amazing. Shout out to the grand haven tribune for reaching out to me and doing this interview! I genuinely have so much fun at my job. Thank you to all of my amazing customers, and here's to 2025!
What's On Your Mind series: Josiah Jackson, 20, known as “The Piano Doctor” on social media, has been fixing and tuning pianos for the past few years. His passion for pianos led him to this role in West Michigan.
“I grew up playing since I was about 4 years old,” he said, “but I actually never really took to it until I was about 11 or 12 when I saw a YouTube video of a guy playing this really insane song and I wanted to learn how to play it. But my mom was like, ‘You’re going to have to practice,’ so it really kicked in. I was practicing maybe three or four hours a day. That’s when my piano obsession started.
“When I was growing up I always wanted to be a pianist. From that point on, I had to find something to support myself, because eventually I realized I didn’t like performing. I had a couple opportunities to play in high school and be on stage, but I realized it’s fun, but this is definitely not something that I want to do for a living. But I love piano. I love to play and do something around that. That’s kind of how I stumbled into piano tuning and repair, and then I made the YouTube channel from there.
“I started making videos, just kind of throwing together a video. I made videos of me playing the piano, but it never went anywhere, never really got any views. Then I threw together a video of me fixing a piano and playing the before and after, and it got about 10 million views. I thought that was crazy. I remember staring at my phone not expecting that at all. ... There’s nobody out there that makes content or entertainment videos about piano tuning and repair.
“A lot of people don’t realize piano tuning is a good career path. I’m a big proponent for the trades in general. There’s not enough people getting into the trades right now, like plumbing, electrical, anything like that. There’s so many people, especially like the younger generation, that don’t see the manual labor as attractive. But if you enjoy the trades, like I genuinely really enjoy piano tuning. It’s so satisfying seeing it all come together and seeing the owner’s reaction after I brought back the whole piano that was like way gone, to see that is so much fun. I just genuinely love my job.
“You have to have a very specific personality for it. I am a perfectionist through and through, and you have to be able to just sit there and tune 88 keys on the piano, and then three strings for each note. You have to do the same thing – I think it’s an average of 236 times – to get a piano finally in tune. It’s really mentally taxing, especially whenever you’re first starting out. But if you have that type of personality where you just enjoy making things better, the feeling of completeness that you get once it’s done, is just amazing.
“I really like to see the customers reactions after I’m done, especially working with two different types of customers. The first is the musicians that know their stuff. If I do a tuning for them and have them sit down and play for me after I’m done and I get little concerts every day. ... Then the other group is people that haven’t had their piano maintained in a long time. It’s a lot of work, but if you can go there, three or four hours make a huge difference on the piano. I’ve had people start crying after I’m done, because it’s, for example, their grandma’s piano, and it hasn’t been tuned in 20 or 30 years, and they say it’s like grandma’s playing the piano again.
“I think the average 18-year-old is on track to spend 85 percent of their free time looking at a screen, and I hate that. I fall for that, too. Part of the reason that I make videos in general about pianos is to, one, inspire more piano tuners because we need those; and, two, inspire people to do something and go learn a skill. I just don’t want people to spend their whole lives watching.
“I would care less if people stop watching my videos on Instagram or my videos on TikTok altogether. I don’t do it just to make money. My main thing isn’t finance – I make videos for fun. I wouldn’t mind if people stopped watching – I want them to get off their phones and go do something a little bit old-fashioned, something that’s rewarding.”
