For several years I travelled around North America and Europe hunting public pianos.  I looked at playing in public as a practice room where I could also share my music. Often the pianos were in rough shape so I started tinkering. Regularly the tuners would come around and get the pianos sounding their best. I would watch, listen, ask questions. Eventually one gave me a set of his old tools and I started touching up a note here and there. Soon I was tuning for friends and family. I realized this could be a way to make money within music without drawing on the same well I needed to preserve for writing/performing. When I was ready, I started making classified listings and began tuning for strangers. Early 2019 I did an online tuning course to become “certified”. By the end of 2019 I was burnt out from my musical adventures. In January 2020 I was in New Zealand and suffered a nasty concussion. I returned home to the world shutting down for the covid days. It seems life was trying to tell me to slow down, but until I listened it would bang me over the head. I pivoted, and since January 2021 I have been traveling around Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast in my van building a piano tuning business. I haven’t counted, but I am currently somewhere around 1000 pianos tuned. My customer list has grown deep enough, that I know I can take chunks of time to go into artist mode, and on return my calendar will be full of tunings (Generally spring and fall are tuning season). Artist mode has been gradually coming back as my head recovers, and I am blessed to be finding a balance as an artist with a way of funding myself, while deepening my connection to pianos.