Tidbits you may find interesting
- From our humble beginnings of just 27 students the first year, we doubled in size to 54 the second, and to 110 the third. We continued growing. We are the largest school in the world training piano technicians, and have students and graduates in over 90 countries, and on six (out of seven) continents! Randy didn’t think all this stuff all by himself you know! More than 50 technicians, including more than a dozen piano manufacturers in Europe, America and Asia, have provided training that has been incorporated into the school’s training program.
- We are the only home study / distance education piano technology school ever approved by the Canadian Department of Education.
- Each year about one-quarter of our students are already full-time piano technicians! They take our Continuing Education Course to help them increase their tuning, repairing, regulating and business skills, with the plan to take, and pass, the PTG’s Registered Piano Technicians Guild examinations to become an RPT.
- Each year about half of the new RPTs in PTG are students or graduates of the Randy Potter School of Piano Technology.
- We are the only home study course ever to have a Mentoring-Apprenticing Program built into the course training program.
- For over 25 years we have also had week-long, intensive hands-on training seminars for our students and graduates (as well as non-students). This was Danny Boone’s idea, and after three years of pressuring Randy (truly) we held our first week-long seminar at Baylor University in 1990. Danny Boone, RPT, and Tom Cobble, RPT, co-taught with Randy, and helped get the hands-on seminar program developed. (We held these seminars at Baylor for two years, at Northwestern College in St. Paul for about 12 years, at the PTG Home Office (we were the first group to hold a hands-on training seminar at the (then new) building, and at Montana State University for 10 years. We moved the seminar to Cunningham Piano in Philadelphia in 2015.)
- We have separate Beginning and Intermediate Training Seminars (BITS) and Advanced Training Seminars (ATS) each year now.
- Randy generally is asked to teach at about a dozen seminars in the US and elsewhere each year.
- He is a member of technical organizations in both Europe and Asia, and is the only American to take and pass the Australasian Piano Tuners and Technicians Association (APTTA) proficiency exams and become and ARPT in the organization. He is a Member of the Queensland Branch.