Randi Potter is a world renowned piano technician and the founder of the Randy Potter School of Piano Technology. For over 30 years, Randi has offered quality instruction through her complete correspondence home-study course for beginning and intermediate students in piano tuning, repairing, regulating, voicing, apprentice training and business practices.
Randi Potter was born into a musical family. Her great-grandfather was an orchestra conductor in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her grandfather, who lived nearby and took an active interest in Randi’s music education, was also an orchestra conductor, composer, and a violinist in the Portland Symphony (now the Oregon Symphony) for nearly 50 years. Her father was a trumpet player, and after he finished his schooling was battalion bugler in the Army during World War II.
Randi began playing the accordion at age eight, the piano at 11, the organ at 14, the guitar at 15 the banjo at 20 and the fiddle at 46. While a music student at Seattle-Pacific University in Seattle, Washington, she started learning to play the banjo. The banjo was a gift from her grand-father who played it in the Pantages Vaudeville circuit in the ’20s and ’30s, before he wrote music scores for RKO Pictures. Randi’s violin, which is 200 years old, was passed to her from her grandfather, who played it on the Vaudeville circuit and in the symphony. Randi graduated from SPU with a Bachelor’s Degree in Biblical Literature and a Minor in Music, vocal and piano.
Her literature studies and writing abilities landed her a job with Boeing Aerospace Corporation in Seattle, as a technical writer for the Minuteman Missile Program. There she wrote step-by-step plans for shop personnel to use in manufacturing and fabricating aerospace equipment and parts for the Minuteman Missile Program – an excellent precursor to writing this course.
Randi learned to tune, and started her piano business, while a post-graduate student at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary in Portland, Oregon. Like you, she began her career in piano tuning with a correspondence course. After several months of working on her own, Randi met Joe Garrett, a member of the Portland Chapter of PTG, and a competent technician and rebuilder. Randi worked with Mr. Garrett in a partial apprenticeship, through the passing of her Registered Piano Technician Exams, and later studied rebuilding with him.
Later, Randi had opportunities to attend factory technicians training programs at Baldwin, Kimball, Steinway, Yamaha, Steingraeber and Bösendorfer, including Steinway’s Factory Training Seminar, Tone Regulation Seminar, and Concerts and Artist Division training with Franz Mohr, Horowitz’ technician for 34 years, and Yamaha’s Disklavier Training Seminar. She has also attended PianoDisc’s Service Seminar. Over the years, Randi has visited more than a dozen piano factories in the U.S., England, Denmark, Germany, Austria, The Czech Republic and Japan.
Most technicians today are not able to get into even one of these factory training programs; partly because the availability is so limited (some only accept a dozen or so technicians a year), and because others have been discontinued. However, Randi has integrated the things she learned at these training programs, and other factories she has visited like Egved in Denmark, Kemble in England, Kawai in Japan, Petrof in The Czech Republic, Bechstein, Grotrian-Steinweg, Shimmel, and Hamburg Steinway in Germany, and Wurlitzer in the US, into the course.
Though she intended only to do piano work part-time when she began, by the time she graduated from Western Randi not only had a full-time clientele, but enough work to keep a second technician (whom she trained) working full-time as well. She was On-Call Concert Technician for the Portland Memorial Coliseum and frequently was called to tune for major groups such as The Moody Blues, Styx, Firefall, the Marshall Tucker band, Judy Collins, the Doobie Brothers, Dan Fogelberg, KISS, Ronny Milsap and more.
Randi trained several apprentices, one-on-one in a somewhat “traditional” apprentice training program. When one of her apprentices went out on his own, in the mid-1980’s, Randi again questioned if there was not some better way to train technicians. Truly, one-on-one is not cost effective for either the student or the mentor. Most technicians, or shops, will not take a student technician unless he/she has had some prior training – but getting proper training is difficult. The only way would be a modern, up-to-date, complete course that was also affordable – but there was no such course available anywhere in the world. Thus the writing of this course.
RandiSue Potter is a Registered Piano Technician (RPT) Member of the Piano Technicians Guild, a Registered Piano Technician Member (ARPT) of Australasian Piano Tuners and Technicians Association (APTTA), and Doctor of Piano Engineering member of the Paster Piano Technicians Association (MPT). She is a well-known conference instructor, and has taught at PTG conventions from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, California to Virginia, Texas to Florida, British Columbia to Quebec, and in Europe, Cuba, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.