88 Lessons: Why We Built a Piano Tuning Course as a Daily Podcast
Every educator eventually faces a format question: how should this be taught?
For most skills, the answer is obvious. You read a book. You take a class. You watch videos. But for aural piano tuning — a skill that is fundamentally about listening — none of those formats felt right.
Books can describe intervals. Videos can demonstrate technique. But neither of them trains your ear. And ear training, it turns out, requires something very specific: repeated, focused, progressive listening practice, delivered in digestible doses, over an extended period of time.
That’s a podcast.
The Problem With How Piano Tuning Is Usually Taught
Piano tuning has traditionally been taught in one of two ways:
Apprenticeship. You find a working tuner willing to take you on, ride with them for months or years, and absorb the craft through proximity. This works — it’s how master craftspeople have transmitted skills for centuries — but it doesn’t scale. There aren’t enough master tuners willing to take apprentices, and geography limits access severely.
Trade school or PTG courses. Structured programs exist, but they’re intensive, expensive, geographically concentrated, and compressed into short formats. You learn a lot quickly, but you don’t get the extended repetition that deep skill acquisition requires.
Both models share a problem: they treat piano tuning as a body of knowledge to be transmitted, rather than a perceptual skill to be developed.
Knowing how equal temperament works does not mean you can hear it. These are different things. And the gap between them is closed only by practice — specifically, by listening to the same intervals hundreds of times in different contexts until your auditory system internalizes the pattern.
Why the Podcast Format Is Right
When I designed 88 Lessons, I kept coming back to one question: what does the learner actually need to do every day?
The answer was: listen.
Not watch. Not read. Not take notes. Listen — actively, attentively, with focused attention on specific sonic phenomena.
A podcast is the only mass-distribution medium that is entirely about listening. It trains the same faculty it’s teaching. You’re not watching someone tune a piano and wishing you could hear the beats more clearly. You’re listening — and your ear is developing in real time.
There’s also something powerful about the serialized daily format specifically.
Daily practice is how skills are built. Neuroscience is clear on this: distributed practice over time beats massed practice in a short window, every time. Learning something for fifteen minutes a day for ninety days produces deeper, more durable skill than learning the same material in a single intensive weekend.
Sequential release creates commitment. When you know Episode 4 is coming tomorrow, you stay engaged. The curriculum unfolds like a story. There’s momentum. There’s anticipation. That’s not accidental — it’s designed.
Short episodes lower the barrier to entry. Fifteen minutes a day is achievable by almost anyone. A busy piano teacher, a musician with a day job, someone considering a career change — they can all find fifteen minutes. That accessibility matters in a niche where the potential audience is large but scattered.
The 88-Lesson Structure
The number 88 is not arbitrary. It’s the number of keys on a standard piano. It’s also, roughly, the number of days in three months — which is the minimum time needed to develop the perceptual foundations of aural tuning from scratch.
The curriculum is divided into seven phases:
Phase 1: Foundations of Listening (Lessons 1–12) Before any piano tuning, we develop the ear. What are beats? What are harmonics? How does your auditory system process complex sounds? These lessons are about building the sensory vocabulary everything else depends on.
Phase 2: The Unison (Lessons 13–22) The first real tuning skill: matching strings to each other. You learn to eliminate beats between unison strings — the most basic tuning operation, and the one that teaches you what “in tune” actually feels like.
Phase 3: Octaves and Foundations (Lessons 23–34) The bedrock of the piano. You learn to tune clean octaves and understand why they’re never perfectly beatless in a real piano. Inharmonicity is introduced — the property that makes every piano unique.
Phase 4: Temperament (Lessons 35–55) The core of the course. Equal temperament is constructed from the ground up: setting fourths and fifths, checking with thirds, building and verifying the temperament octave. This is where the intellectual understanding becomes perceptual reality.
Phase 5: Extending the Temperament (Lessons 56–67) You learn to copy the temperament octave accurately across the full keyboard. Octave tuning in the bass and treble, where the piano’s acoustics get complicated and your ear needs new skills.
Phase 6: The Full Piano (Lessons 68–78) Pulling it all together. Tuning a complete piano from scratch, developing efficient workflow, handling problem notes, recognizing when a piano needs more than tuning.
Phase 7: Professionalism and Mastery (Lessons 79–88) Concert preparation, pitch raises, working with clients, tools and their uses, continuing development as a technician. The craft beyond the tuning.
The AI Question
We’re going to address this directly, because we think it matters.
88 Lessons is built with AI. The scripts are developed with AI assistance. The voice you hear in the podcast is AI-generated, using a clone of my voice. The backend operations that make this platform possible — the content sequencing, the publishing workflows, the admin infrastructure — run on AI tools.
We say this openly, for two reasons.
First: because hiding it would be dishonest, and honesty is foundational to everything we teach. When you’re tuning a piano for a client, they’re trusting your ears and your judgment. That relationship begins with transparency.
Second: because the use of AI here is a direct expression of our educational philosophy. We teach that the best piano technicians integrate technology and human skill. The master tuner uses an ETD and their ear. Neither alone is enough. We built this platform the same way.
The AI makes 88 Lessons possible. Without it, producing a curriculum of this depth and quality for a niche audience of a few thousand people worldwide would not be economically viable. The AI handles the production. The craft — the curriculum architecture, the pedagogical sequencing, the perceptual knowledge being transmitted — comes from years of professional experience and study.
The tools are modern. The knowledge is real.
What Happens at Episode 88
By the end of the course, you’ll be able to sit down at an unfamiliar piano and tune it to equal temperament by ear.
Not perfectly — no one tunes perfectly, not even the best technicians in the world. But competently. Audibly. Professionally.
You’ll have a skill that takes most piano tuners years of hands-on apprenticeship to develop. You’ll have it because you listened, every day, for three months.
That’s the bet we’re making with 88 Lessons. We think it works. We designed it to work. And we’re building the evidence, one listener at a time.
Start from the beginning: Episode 1 is waiting for you.