As an auto buff might lovingly pop the hood of a '57 Chevy that's running a bit rough, David Vanderlip lifts the top of a gleaming black Steinway baby grand--one of dozens of fine pianos in Pomona's veritable groove armada.

He peers inside with the intensity of a surgeon, tinkles out a few notes and makes a few chalk marks on keys, hoping to give an accurate diagnosis of what ails his patient. Above all, he is a good listener, and in the hush of Thatcher's basement, the piano tells him what it needs. Then he sets to work, with an esoteric set of tools ranging from a high-tech "cyber-tuner" to a Snoopy nail file.

Vanderlip is not a familiar face to most Pomona music fans. Only the hyper-observant will have noticed him in the back row of any given performance at Lyman Hall or Little Bridges, ready to leap onstage during intermission for an impromptu fix-it session in the event of a broken string. Most of the time his profile is even lower, as he toils away in the shadows, after hours, when most professors and students aren't around, tuning pianos for classroom and studio.

When he's not doing house-calls on College pianos, you can usually find Pomona's self-styled "Midnight Tuner" (his official title is "piano technician") down in his humble studio in the basement of Thatcher, with a piano or two that have been torn apart, looking rather like a mechanic rebuilding an engine. But instead of puddles of grease or a scatter of spark plugs, you'll find him surrounded by a fascinating jumble of delicate hammers, copper-loaded strings and intricate blocks of wood.

Always fascinated by musical instruments (he began to play both guitar and drums at age five) Vanderlip got a late start on the piano, beginning to play at the age of 20 and focusing mostly on rock, jazz and blues. From the start, however, he can recall coming over to his Mom's house to tune her piano, finding his other "voice" by beginning to "voice" the piano. Ironically, it was a shoulder injury sustained while moving a heavy piano that steered him toward the art of tuning, after he was forced to take time away from actual music performance in order to properly heal: "I still have guitars in my house, but I don't play them anymore--I'm too busy with pianos," he admits.

Tuning privately during the '80s, Vanderlip was first hired to tune pianos at Pomona on a part-time basis. He joined the staff full-time in 1991. Today, some 45 pianos are in his care--ranging from uprights to grands--and it's a full-time job just keeping them in tune. Concert grand pianos are tuned every week, classroom pianos once a month, and studio pianos "when I can get to them, usually twice a semester."

Armed with a nifty little device called a "hydro-meter," which records the exact temperature and humidity within the room to help him calibrate each instrument to optimum pitch, Vanderlip can tune an instrument even when local Santa Ana winds wreak havoc with environmental conditions: lowering humidity, flattening a piano's sound-board due to the relative lack of moisture, and finally bringing the pitch down. When higher humidity returns, the pitch rises as well, but never in exactly the same way. As a result, Vanderlip has his work cut out for him most days and nights: "It's a funny kind of job security due to weather conditions," notes Vanderlip, "It's this constant state of flux that keeps me in business."

When he tunes an instrument, Vanderlip works outward from the middle of the keyboard, focusing upon "any note which stands out in terms of volume or discolor--or maybe one that doesn't feel right around your finger." It's an intuitive approach, highly dependent upon a sensitive and well-trained ear. "It isn't so much that you have to have perfect pitch," he explains. "It's that you try to improve your own listening sense, so that you have good relative pitch."

That's all the more important, he says, because the art of tuning is a subjective one, depending on the intended performance: "If you're tuning for a concerto, and they're set to play Brahms, you might want to spread the tuning out a little wider. It might sound out of tune if played solo, but with an orchestra, it's just a little bit on edge so that it stands out more."

That is one reason why many old-school tuners insist on eschewing high-tech gadgets, instead relying on the precision of their own ears to "hear" what the piano may be telling them, referring to the piano as a kind of living, breathing creature. In this age of broadband downloads and sample-heavy music, is this basic human instinct--the ability to really listen--losing ground to electronic wizardry? It's a complex question, even for Vanderlip who, like many of his colleagues, may rely on hand-held devices such as the handy "cyber-tuner," but still believes that crucial human element isn't going away anytime soon.

"All these electronic advances are just tools to help me do my job better, faster," he insists, alluding to the fact that tuning devices are much more sophisticated than they were even a decade ago. "I have them, I have all of them, because I love the gadgets, but your own ear is still the final word," he says, adding that "If someone sits down to play the piano, they're basing their own decision on what they hear, not what some little box may tell them in a computer read-out."

The subjective nature of the work is also an important reason why Vanderlip prefers being on regular staff, working regularly amidst Pomona's music faculty:

"If you're simply a hired contractor who comes in, does his job and leaves, you don't have much interaction with the department as a whole. Whereas being on staff, you know their needs more, as well as the preferences of individual instructors," he says. "You get much more of a consistent flow of information on your colleagues' unique likes and dislikes."

Like a kind of musical therapist to students and professors, Vanderlip has found that much of his actual craft is attempting to properly "read" these distinct preferences, and even moods. "When I arrive to service a piano, the player may be trying to tell me what's wrong, but may not exactly know the mechanics of how the instrument works--could be sound, could be something other than the piano, could be the room. So trying to diagnose the instrument is really a matter of what we like to call 'psycho-acoustics,'" he explains. "There are some things that people hear that I can't fix, or things they might hear, but can't quite articulate. Part of my job is trying to read into that and know how to translate it into something I can identify--and finally resolve."

Gregg Mitchell '89 is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.