University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Gary Shipe works on one of UB’s 140 pianos. “Organs and pianos always have fascinated me,” Shipe says. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE

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  Piano Man: Gary Shipe keeps UB’s keyboards humming. | View audio slideshow

By CHARLOTTE HSU

Published: March 10, 2010

Gary Shipe is alone with two upright pianos in the basement of the Center for the Arts, their hardwood fronts removed to expose their complicated innards—soundboard, steel strings, rows of wooden hammers wrapped in felt.

With his left hand, he pounds away at the black-and-white keys. With his right, he clutches a tuning wrench that he uses to tighten and loosen pins around which the strings of one instrument are wrapped.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Twist. Tap, tap, tap. Twist. Tap, tap. Twist.

Each turn of his tool alters the pitch a key produces. He starts with the low notes, hitting each repeatedly, making the piano bellow. His banging on the high notes delivers a noise like a jackhammer—clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.

If everything goes well, tuning one instrument will take about an hour. To the untrained ear, the changes Shipe is making to the piano’s acoustics are inaudible. But Shipe can hear even minute variations. The dips and tilts and inclines in the sound are all familiar. This, after all, is his work.

As UB’s full-time and only piano technician since 1986, he takes care of about 140 pianos, two harpsichords, one forte piano and four pipe organs. He spends his days floating between the university’s practice rooms, rehearsal studios and concert halls. On nights when the university hosts performances, he lurks backstage, ready with his tool kit in case something goes wrong.

His fondness for his occupation and all things mechanical extends beyond his job with the Department of Music. His home is a trove of weird wonders—phonographs, player pianos, a pipe organ he built in his garage from spare parts. Yefim Bronfman, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Gabriela Montero are among pianists he has served as a technician while volunteering at the Nichols School’s annual Ramsi P. Tick Concert Series, which brings world-class musicians to Buffalo.

“Organs and pianos always fascinated me,” says Shipe, a deeply thoughtful man with a whimsical air, wire-frame glasses and a crown of white hair. “When I was in high school and they had the high school science fair, everyone’s making little volcanoes, and I built an actual, working, one-manual pipe organ. Just one keyboard, but it was the real thing, with pipes. I got on the local television with that one.”

The son of a dairy farmer, Shipe, now 63, grew up in a town called Barnesville in southeastern Ohio on a property that included a saw mill. His upbringing—the entrepreneurial spirit that came, partly out of necessity from living in a rural place—fueled his love for machinery and passion for investigating how things worked. As a teenager, he went through a clock-collecting phase. The first time his father took apart the family piano to research a problem with its inner workings, “I thought, ‘Oh gee, this is neat,’” Shipe remembers.

After high school, he completed a one-year program in piano technology at Westchester Conservatory in White Plains, N.Y. He found work in Wheeling, W. Va. at a company that sold, tuned and repaired pianos—Baldwins, Kawais, Wurlitzers and Yamahas. His job included house calls, and one particularly riveting assignment brought him deep into the hills, to the home of a buyer with a complaint about a new spinet piano.

“I go to the house and there’s no answer to the door. I knock and I knock. As I turned around and started to leave, here’s this guy that owned the piano with a gun,” Shipe says. “He didn’t know who I was. He wouldn’t take any chances.”

Shipe returned to his home state in 1976 after deciding he liked Columbus. He became Ohio State University’s resident piano technician. The music department was large, the pace of work furious. In one marathon session before a piano contest, Shipe says, he sat in a warehouse and tuned for 36 hours.

In what Shipe describes as an early mid-life crisis, he moved to Columbia, S.C., lured by a friend who called it heaven on earth, a place where the weather was beautiful. Upon arriving, he immediately began planning his escape. The South was not for him.

UB had an opening for an instrument technician, and Shipe flew in for an interview.

“I made my way up Millersport,” Shipe says, “and there was a sign—‘university this way.’ And this was, remember 24 years ago. I remember driving onto this campus and there were those little bitty trees on the windswept plains, these little buildings sticking up. And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness.’ It was very stark.”

Stark, but a better fit for Shipe than South Carolina. The university offered him the job, and his decision to take it was quick. It was, he says, “the world that I knew.” He loves being a part of the campus community, and the workload at UB is more manageable than that at Ohio State, which housed many more music students.

He cringes sometimes at the university’s enthusiasm for the contemporary—some artists lace violin bow horsehair or place bolts and screws between strings to alter pianos’ tonal quality—but he finds the innovations “interesting” and absorbs it all as a “learning experience.”

Philip Rehard, concert manager, says Shipe, a long-time friend, “has been known to work magic on pianos.” The technician’s work goes beyond tuning.

“There’s this other mystical thing called voicing, and that’s when you’re adjusting the timbre—the color of the sound and the volume of the sound in addition to the pitch,” Shipe says. The process can involve calibrating piano hammers, which are covered in felt and hit an instrument’s strings to produce music each time a player presses a key.

“When these pianos are heavily played, the felt in a piano hammer will tend to compress,” Shipe explains. “Once a piano is in use, usually the sound is getting brighter and harder instead of softer and more mellow. You use a needle tool to open up the fibers and restore the hammers to their original intended sound. And they wear. You have to actually take sandpaper and reshape the hammers.”

Shipe can fix anything, Rehard says. There is evidence to back that assertion up. At home, Shipe has fixed old player pianos. He is restoring a 1962 Ford Thunderbird convertible. (He first came upon the red-and-black car, defunct and dead under layers of dust, in the garage of a neighbor of a faculty member who needed help with a piano.)

After retirement, Shipe thinks he’ll make brooms (his grandfather did, too). He finds the process comforting—soaking the broomcorn in water, winding wire around the fibers to hold the broom together, stitching everything together. He has made one for his mother, one for his father and several for music department colleagues, including Rehard, who praises his as “awesome.”

Rehard expects that Shipe’s brooms—like “everything else that he does”—will turn out to be “just the right thing.”