Forty years, a good ear, and a life in music

Scott Portzline has been a professional musician and entertainer for nearly all his life, and he has spent over forty years working on other people’s pianos. He loves tuning them, partly for the immediate results: a piano that sounded tired at the start of the afternoon sounds like itself again by the end of it. What he enjoys most is hearing world-class artists play an instrument he prepared.

He has tuned for hundreds of pop, jazz and big band concerts around Harrisburg and Central Pennsylvania, for names including Tony Bennett, Marvin Hamlisch, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Buddy Rich, McCoy Tyner, Wynton Marsalis, Huey Lewis and The News and Jimmy Webb. The Harrisburg Opera Association has used his tuning and moving for more than twenty-five years, and the Artisan Guitar Show describes decades of working together.

The music started early. He was part of the East Pennsboro High School Marching Band through the 1970s, a band that took the state championship title twice and sent a good number of its players into music for a living. He earned his Eagle Scout award in 1976. Scott spent years on stage as an entertainer, including writing comedy sketches.

There is another life-long aspiration alongside the music. Scott is known for his research into counter-terrorism at nuclear power plants and has been featured on Dateline NBC, CNN, ABC News, PBS and the BBC for that work.

Scott treats every piano the same and will make yours sound as good as it can. He recommends having the action adjusted at least once a decade and the piano tuned at least once a year. The person who answers the phone is the person who does the job. Appointments run Monday through Saturday out of Harrisburg, PA, and it always starts with a call.