My Biz: Finding the perfect pitch

Pete Cacioppo arrives at a customer’s address, unpacks his tool kit, and gets under the hood.

“There’s three strings per note,” he said, laying a strip of felt across the strings of the baby grand piano at All Saints Catholic Church. “I’m isolating the center string so I’m not hearing the right and left string. That gives me the reference pitch.”

Cacioppo, 58, has been in and around keyboards for 50 years. He began taking piano lessons from Frank Osmanski, a noted jazz player at local clubs, at eight but favored vocal music and sports in high school. He went to the University of Iowa not knowing just what he’d do.

“I was playing in bands, I was taking music courses because they were easy,” he said. “I took some business classes and didn’t really know what I wanted to do.”

Flipping through a magazine one day, he noticed an ad for a Florida technical college’s audio and video production program.

“I’m like, ‘That’s what I’m going to do,’” Cacioppo said.

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That led to steady work in Florida in recording studios and live productions for cruise ships. Returning to Cedar Rapids in 1992, Cacioppo found work as a sound technician for touring bands. Stopping one day at Carma Lou’s House of Music to buy equipment, he sat down at the store’s piano, drawing the attention of owner Carma Lou Beck.

“I said I’d just got out of school for audio and video production, so she said ‘I’ve got a studio, it’s been sitting here empty. Would you be interested in running it?’” he said. “I started selling pianos during the day and doing sessions at night.”

After Carma Lou’s closed in 1996, Cacioppo sold pianos for a dealer in St. Louis, later returning to manage West Music’s Cedar Rapids piano department for 14 years. He launched Pete’s Piano Service in 2012.

“I still didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” he said. “I started tuning pianos, I really liked it, and I got better at it and I was tired of working for somebody else. I finally had the confidence to say, ‘I’m going to take a leap of faith and see what happens.’ I knew that a lot of piano technicians were retiring, because I knew all of them.”

Pianos that see regular use should be tuned at least once a year.

“We get all the fluctuations in temperature and humidity,” he said. “It depends on where people have their piano in the house, it depends on the piano and how much it’s played, the quality of the piano. There are some people I see every five years or I see them once and never hear from them again. It’s easy to walk past your piano unless you’re the person who plays it.”

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Within about 100 miles of his southeast Cedar Rapids home, Cacioppo charges $150 if no additional work is needed.

Big shows at the Paramount Theatre and McGrath Amphitheatre present their own challenges.

“A lot of time they’re bringing their piano in off a truck, and it has to sit there,” he said. “Orchestra Iowa has its own piano, but it’s going to get played hard, under the hot stage lights. At the Amphitheater the sun starts going down in the west and starts beating down on that black piano and it’s going to go out of tune. I usually get hired for the day, so I’ll go in before rehearsal, tune the piano, and after the rehearsal I’ll go back in and touch it up.”

Cacioppo also enjoys bringing disused pianos back to life.

“I never know what I’m going to find when someone picks up a free piano,” he said. “Some of it I have to take back to my shop, the mechanical part. Some of it is like building a ship in a bottle. You can’t see what you’re doing, you’ve just got to know it’s there.”

One job Cacioppo will turn down: piano moving.

“Not since my doctor said ‘No more for you,’” he said. “I’m happy to call somebody to do it. I have my handful that I go to. There are some people I would not recommend. It’s not like moving a refrigerator.”

Cacioppo’s happy with his career choice.

“I’m lucky, because I’m about as busy as I want to be,” he said. “My customers are great. One of my favorite parts of this business is, you really get to know the families and you see the kids growing up and advancing in their lessons. I see me in them, going through it.”