There is a particular kind of silence that happens right before a piano is in tune. The note is close, but not settled. Most people would not hear the difference. Todd Rice has spent his life listening for exactly that difference.

He trained as a piano tuner and master craftsman through a European-style apprenticeship under Kalman Detrich, founder of the Museum of the American Piano in New York City. That apprenticeship is where the real education started, not because it taught Todd to fix pianos, but because it taught him to listen at a level most people never reach. Piano tuning is a relationship among hundreds of strings, each pulling against the others, each slightly affecting the others. To tune one is to listen to the whole instrument at once, and to feel, by ear and by hand, the exact point where tension resolves into harmony. Todd now carries that craft forward through his own piano service, A Natural Piano, and that same listening became the thread that runs through everything else he has done since.

It runs through his earliest years on stage. Todd built a career as a professional pianist, scoring more than twenty-five films, videos, and commercials, and performing on television and radio. He spent four years as the house pianist at Garvin’s Jazz and Supper Club, played private events and clubs across New York City, and was once introduced on the Joe Franklin Show as “red hot on the NYC cabaret scene.” He collaborated with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Zindel, and music directed for five years for Gregg Burge, who choreographed Michael Jackson’s “Bad” and “Thriller.” He served as musical director for the 15th anniversary production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which played the Beacon Theater and toured Japan, where he met and worked with Meatloaf. Every one of those rooms required the same skill as the tuning bench: listen first, then respond to what is actually there.

It runs through his formal education. Todd earned a B.A. in Musical Composition from the Manhattan School of Music, where he won the Wholley Award for his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. Then he received a grant from the Geraldine Dodge Foundation. He later earned an M.S. in Industrial Psychology and Human Resources Education from Fordham University, a pivot that looks unusual on paper until you notice the throughline: composition asks you to build a structure and listen for what it is trying to become. Psychology asks you to do the same with people.

That pivot led him into teaching and organizational work, where listening was the actual job. In 1998, he introduced what is now called modern learning theory into the New York City school system, building two training programs around the idea that every student listens and learns differently, and that a classroom should be built to hear each of them. He served on the faculty at St. Peter’s College. He went on to provide executive coaching, public speaking, creativity workshops, and team building for organizations including General Electric, the Loma Linda Medical University Transplant Division, and the Amadeus Corporation, along with consulting work across financial services, wellness, and food and grocery businesses. He spent time on Tony Robbins’ staff. He also composed the soundtrack for the “World’s Greatest Photography Course,” which won Best Instructional Video at the Chicago Film Festival.

Eventually, that same attention turned inward, toward the deeper architecture of how people change. Todd is first-generation NLP. He holds 11 certifications in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, including Master, Trainer and has studied directly with NLP’s developers and co-creator. He is certified in EFT and is a COACH-certified coach under Carol Look. He holds the SACAT (Strategic Attraction Coaching and Training) certification and is a 200-hour RYT-certified Aligned Vinyasa yoga teacher. Each of these is, in its own way, a different instrument for the same skill: tuning in to what is actually happening in a person, beneath what they are saying.

Todd wrote about this kind of listening once already, in his book Secret Strategies for Composing and Improvising, which looks at musical creation through the same lens he now brings to human change. He is currently at work on a new book, Tuning In, as a direct teaching for deep listening: how to sense tension before it becomes a problem, how to feel when something is almost right but not yet resolved, and how to bring a person, like an instrument, into their own natural harmony.

This is the throughline of everything Todd does, whether he is at a keyboard, in front of a piano’s open lid, or sitting across from a client. He believes everyone is a genius, but that genius gets stuck, the way a string goes flat without anyone noticing right away. His work, in every form it has taken, is the practice of noticing. Of listening closely enough, for long enough, that what was stuck finds its way back into tune.

His YouTube Channel is www.youtube.com/@toddricecreative6409