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MELIA BOWIEThough she dabbled in several fields over the years, Susan Graham always returned to tuning pianos.
SPRING HILL - There is something about the bright red felt, the subtle shifts in sound and the intricacies of tuning a piano that hooked Susan Graham.
She tried college, "white-collar work," even a job teaching scuba diving in the Cayman Islands. But it always came back to pianos, her career for more than 31 years.
Now Graham, 51, is breaking a gender barrier as the first female piano service consultant for Yamaha. The company has 11 such consultants nationwide; Graham covers the Southeast.
"In the Japanese culture," said Graham, "women don't traditionally go out on service calls.
The work can range from the mundane to outlandish, said Graham. She has tuned pianos on cruise ships, military bases, aircraft carriers, in concert halls and recording studios, inside prisons, at nightclubs and inside homes from California to Florida.
Part of Graham's expertise and her appeal to Yamaha was her ability to produce the best sound from its instruments and good relationships with the artists who play them.
"Our pianos start at $6,000 and go to $339,000, so we're dealing with a high-end product," said Bill Brandom, senior technical manager with the piano division at Yamaha Corporation of America in Buena Park, Ca.
"A lot of the work is technical," he said. "But a lot of it is hand-holding. (Our clients) they want it to sound and play the way they expect it to."
The primary duty of consultants is to tune concert pianos, resolve warranty problems and to educate and train others to work on Yamaha products.
"She (Graham) is the first female consultant Yamaha has ever had in the United States," Brandom said, attributing the delay to the male-dominated nature of the field and timing. "When Susan moved to Florida, where we were looking for a consultant, she fit the bill perfectly."
Since relocating to Pasco in April 2000, Graham logs about 900 miles a week - primarily to jobs along Florida's west coast. She tunes between 600 and 700 pianos annually.
Generally, each piano key needs 37 adjustments. Multiply that by 88 keys and tuning becomes a time-consuming task.
"Susan is considered one of the best technicians in the United States," though, said Brandom.
In addition to her role as service consultant, Graham leads the bay area's Piano Technicians Guild and served nationally as editor of industry publications.
With a quiet demeanor, nimble hands and a good ear, she has tweaked and tuned everything from Steinways to Bosendorfer Imperial grands.
But now it is her work with Yamaha that has Graham making trips throughout Florida and to the West Coast - most recently to a national music merchants trade show where she worked amid forklifts on concert grands, perfecting each piano's performance.
"Normally tuners don't travel so much," she said recently, working in an insulated, climate-controlled workshop at her home with an assortment of sharpened specialty tools.
Her new position, awarded in November 2003, changed that.
The drives are longer and air travel with all of her equipment has proved especially interesting in the middle of heightened security, she noted, laughing.
But perhaps the business is in her blood, said Graham whose grandfather owned a piano store.
Then again, maybe not.
"I don't even play the piano," she confided. "That surprises people; most tuners don't."
But "I loved classical instruments,' she said. "I wanted to build violins but at that time (in 1971 when she was studying) you couldn't get trained for that in the United States. I'd have had to go to Germany."
There was a piano tuning school in Ohio where Graham was attending Antioch University. She studied and learned to tune and rebuild them. Over time, her training was broadened to include proficiency with Yamaha's Disklavier - a combination acoustic string piano with digital components that allow owners to record and play back their own performances.
Now Graham's work comes with interesting locales and some nice perks, among them the satisfaction of making 60-year-old pianos sound like new and private concerts from professionals and beginners.
"Not only do I enjoy the work, but it's a nice job," she said. "People are happy to see me. I improve their lives, tune their pianos."