10 ms·

For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump

107 points by dangoldin 14y ago

DannoHung 14y ago
Something about throwing out musical instruments bothers me... the same way as it does with books.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  I wonder how similar the act is? Lots and lots of books are crap that is printed on cheap paper for sale in airports, and I don't see much reason to lament tossing such a thing (especially if it is damaged). I suppose you should take care to not extend the sentiment to finely crafted foods.
- udp 14y ago
  It's pretty horrible if you lose a hand-made instrument, because even if it was insured, you're never going to play something that plays exactly the same again. (This happened to me a few weeks ago with a flute.)
- bgutierrez 14y ago
  I know exactly what you mean. Then I worked at Barnes and Noble where we tore the covers off of mass markets that couldn't sell to send back to the publisher and discarded the rest of the book. Every now and then a decent book would go into this pile (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, once) but the vast majority of time it was harlequins and similar stuff that was churned out for indiscriminate tastes. Imagine whole garbage cans of this stuff. Stuff that would be replaced the following day and then thrown out the following month. Sometimes books simply aren't worth the shelf space. I eventually felt the same about a $50 guitar that I bought out of musiciansfriend catalogue when I was 16. Tuning pegs that wouldn't sit still, poorly aligned frets… the rosette was printed onto a piece of paper. It's hard to believe that something as beautiful as a musical instrument could be built so poorly.
fredley 14y ago
I expect this is largely due to the prevalence of decent-enough quality digital pianos. A school or church no longer needs to deal with a second-hand honky-tonk that needs maintenance and tuning (not to mention several people to move) - they can get a passable digital for a few hundred bucks. The only market for real pianos these days is with serious professionals, concert venues, and people who use them as furniture.
- mechanical_fish 14y ago
  The implication of this article is that even the furniture market is limited. You can get some very nice vintage-looking completely unplayable pianos from a Craigslist ad. I also wouldn't say that a real piano is only for a serious pro. Real pianos are a different instrument from keyboards; I wanted one within two weeks of starting piano lessons. But that brings us to the other half of the equation: New pianos are relatively inexpensive, because manufacturing is increasingly efficient. It's more cost-effective to buy new than to take a chance on rehabilitating a piano from 1962. EDIT: Incidentally, when I say "relatively inexpensive", I mean "for a piano". There's a very real temptation to stick with electronic keyboards. The temptation is measured in kilodollars.
  - fredley 14y ago
    Nothing is the same, it's true, but for serious practise a digital can be better. The key response and weighting will be consistent (good luck getting that with an old instrument) and the tuning spot on. I used to be a sceptic, but playing the latest digitals which acoustically model the soundboard, strings and action of a piano, the experience is very impressive. It genuinely does feel like playing the real thing, even if the sound comes through speakers. If I come to buy my own piano, I'd go digital.
    - dman 14y ago
      Any recommendations for digital?
      - 14y ago
mechanical_fish 14y ago
Larry Fine's Piano Book is an interesting read. The take-home lesson is that pianos are far more fragile than they look. They are continuously falling apart. Poor humidity and temperature control takes its toll on them, the soundboard wears out, the tuning pegs wear out, all of that felt most definitely ages and wears out and stiffens, they're full of moving parts, and even letting them get too far out of tune will damage them long-term. Most of those eighty-year-old instruments really aren't worth keeping, and if you want your instrument to live to be eighty in good condition you need to budget for ongoing maintenance, and then eventually get the thing torn down and rebuilt. It's like owning a car. It's hard, though, because I remember playing with my late grandmother's piano when I was around five years old, and now it's probably in a landfill somewhere. On the other hand, I still have my grandfather's slide rule, which he took to meteorology school at MIT during World War II. The secret is to choose highly portable mementoes of a bygone technological era. ;)
- fredley 14y ago
  This is very true. Honestly, even the best-kept instrument degrades significantly over time. When's the last time you saw anything but a brand new instrument in a big concert? There's a reason you never see pros playing treasured vintage instruments the way a violinist would. Aside from their historical or ornamental value as furniture, old pianos are pretty useless.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    > There's a reason you never see pros playing treasured vintage instruments the way a violinist would. I don't understand. Violins are instruments too. Did you just mean pianos, or others too?
    - pnathan 14y ago
      Pianos don't improve with age. A decently constructed instrument in the violin family will, as will (to a lesser extent) brass instruments. I don't have a particular set of citations, it's just musician lore.
    - 14y ago
cfinke 14y ago
A piano that has not been regularly tuned will lose its ability to stay tuned, turning it into a very large and heavy place to display sheet music, just like a car that never gets an oil change will eventually become an immobile scrap metal sculpture. Shortly after we got married, my wife and I took possession of a 1918 upright piano that had not been tuned in a long time. We didn't know enough about pianos to know better, so we spent considerable time and effort to transport it 40 miles and up a short flight of stairs into our new home... only to dismantle it by hand less than a year later and slowly throw it away. It couldn't be tuned, and it took up too much room to keep if it wasn't going to be played. I think we sold the cast iron soundboard as scrap for a few dollars, and I did save some of the larger pieces of wood, which I used to build a bed for my two-year old son a few years later. As a side note, if you've never taken apart a piano, I highly recommend it. You get a specific understanding of its inner workings, even if you think you already know how it functions. Pictures of the piano disassembly: With the keyboard removed: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2193/2299985304_d0b38313f6_b.jpg http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2193/2299985304_d0b38313f6_b.j... The keys that I saved for a long time but never found a use for: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2091/2299984652_a024f4a05e_b.jpg http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2091/2299984652_a024f4a05e_b.j... (They're like teeth that have been knocked out: much much longer than you'd expect.) The soundboard exposed, and the huge screwdriver I had to buy (see the top of the photo) to remove the screws attaching it to the wooden back: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3105/2300002756_92e8503676_b.jpg http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3105/2300002756_92e8503676_b.j... The soundboard removed: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2217/2300002188_68c614d900_b.jpg http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2217/2300002188_68c614d900_b.j... Just a portion of the screws and other hardware holding it together: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2095/2299206761_ae640697d9_b.jpg http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2095/2299206761_ae640697d9_b.j...
- roqetman 14y ago
  I've taken apart a couple of discarded pianos. The saddest part is cutting the wires with a wire cutter (watch it, they whip outward) - the sound is so mournful and haunting.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
dugmartin 14y ago
From the classifieds and Craigslist listings around here I'd say the value of upright pianos is actually negative. They are offered as free as long as you agree to move them. We bought our kids an old used full-sized keyboard (Technics P-30). It is an older model but it sounds nice and most importantly, the kids can practice with headphones on, saving the sanity of others in the house.
- lotharbot 14y ago
  > "I'd say the value of upright pianos is actually negative." We just got rid of my parents' old upright piano, which had been abused by all of us kids for decades, but was still almost perfectly in tune. It was definitely negative value. It was heavy and taking up valuable space. It cost almost $200 to get piano movers to take it to salvage / the dump. So if someone had taken it for free, we would have been ecstatic. (Also, our Technics SX-PX552 does the job just fine.)
UrLicht 14y ago
I once bought a beater piano for $200 so I could practice tuning it. We didn't have room in our apartment, so a friend let us set it up in his and I'd come over once in a while and bang on it (thanks, Eric!). Most of the weight of a piano comes from the cast iron frame inside that holds the >20 tons of tension from the strings. And this piano was no exception - it was an "upright grand" meaning it was as tall as a baby grand is long. It took six of us to cajole it up my friend's stairs. So when moving time came for him and his wife we had to decide what to do with the piano. None of us wanted to move the damn thing again, and since I really didn't have an emotional attachment to it whatsoever, we came up with the next best idea - cut it to pieces with a sawzall. And like another commenter said, if you ever have the opportunity to do this, do it. It was pretty fun. There's nothing quite like the sound of taking wire cutters to a fully tense piano string.
- cperciva 14y ago
  There's nothing quite like the sound of taking wire cutters to a fully tense piano string. ... as long as you're careful about it. I know musicians who have been injured by being in the wrong place when a string snapped.
digitalsushi 14y ago
I am not a piano player, or even an official player of any musical instrument. I don't know how to read music. A year ago, we were offered an upright Kimball built in 1970 by my newly acquired in-laws. My father in law is a portly fellow and insisted we move it ourselves, but I instead paid exactly 300 dollars to have it moved the 14 miles from Exeter to Lee. We let it adjust to the humidity in our house for a half a year, and then we paid exactly 175 dollars to have it tuned. As subjective as this is, the man who tuned it said "it was a D and now it is a B". He said that the Kimballs are a very cheap piano with a cheap sound, and tried to sell me a grand piano for 5000 dollars used. It would have required I vacate my home office to the basement. He had other pianos for sale, and some were as affordable (but as cheap) as the 300 dollars I paid for a free piano. It's immensely pleasurable having a piano next to where I program. I don't know what I am doing, but I suspect this is a lot of the allure - I sit there and poke, and figure out my programming challenge of the day while my fingers are occupied. We all know full well how the frontal lobe needs to be engaged for the "coprocessor" to have a chance at resolving our issues for us. The piano is about 4 feet wide and barely 2 feet from the wall. Since the bench sits underneath, this is frankly not a huge investment in space. I recommend a piano highly to the non-player due to its affordability and its distraction properties, my own version of prayer beads I use while debugging in my head.
- gjulianm 14y ago
  You're talking about upright pianos... Affordability? Talking with other piano players, here in Spain you can't find a decent piano under 1000€. And, if you're going to buy a crappy piano for "getting distracted" that won't last more than 10 years, better search for a digital one: for the same price of a crappy piano you can get a pretty decent digital keyboard that will fit your needs (and will occupy even less space).
- philbarr 14y ago
  Fantastic! As a piano player myself I find that all too often we get tied up in theory or practice routines or grades. Sometimes you've just got to PLAY THE DAMNED THING. Sort of applies to programming as well if you see what I mean.
- 14y ago
zefhous 14y ago
The better pianos (Steinway, Mason & Hamlin) from the 1920s are actually still very valuable and in demand. A well kept or restored grand piano from that era costs > $20,000 and can be one of the best deals out there for a good instrument. But any low end piano — even one that's only 15-20 years old — is destined for the dumpster before long. There are two problems that cause this: 1. Lack of craftsmanship in the original instrument. 2. The expense and lack of skilled labor to restore and regulate pianos. It's just too expensive and time consuming to have a skilled technician work on a low-quality piano, and because they are not made well in the first place, they just won't stay well-regulated for long. Because of this, even a relatively new and good looking piano doesn't make a great instrument once it gets past a certain point. This is a common problem in music schools. Most of the pianos are in poor condition and the technicians can't keep up with keeping them in good shape, and the good pianos are generally locked up and only the piano majors have access to them. Only high end pianos are worth putting any time and money into, and because of that they actually make a good investment, while the value of low end pianos just drops off a cliff and they end up in a dumpster because they aren't even worth moving and repairing.
EzGraphs 14y ago
Very sad to me. Digital pianos are a great innovation in many respects but are sort of analogous to microwave ovens in cooking. Work well enough to be widely adopted, but are unlikely ever to be the means of producing a masterpiece. The relative lack of (touch) sensitivity and the more limited variation in timbre are immediately noticeable. One of the other qualities of a traditional piano that I instantly miss in even the best digital simulations is sympathetic vibration. Holding the sustain pedal down will not simply allow the notes to play longer. Other strings that freed up begin to vibrate as well. It produces an effect that - the last I checked - is not well emulated in a digital environment. Reflective of the values of our age I guess. Small, relatively portable, low maintenance wins out in many other arenas. Why not music...
- crazygringo 14y ago
  You're talking about keyboards, not digital pianos. I currently use a Yamaha P155. The keys are weighted and touch-sensitive just like a real piano. Each key has its own recording, with its own timbre, at different volume levels. I can even use a damper pedal which responds to have far down I've pushed it. It's not exactly the same as a real piano, but as someone who played a real piano for 10 years, it's damned close. It's not like moving from a gas stove to a microwave, it's like moving from a gas stove to an electric stove. Not quite the same, but for nearly all practical purposes, it's good enough -- and wearing headphones in your apartment so your neighbors don't hate you, it just wins.
  - Dove 14y ago
    I have something similar, and I agree -- a quality digital piano is almost as good as the real thing. In some ways better: it never needs tuned, and the gentler touch is easy on the fingers. I will admit, though, when I want thunder, there's no substitute for real strings.
- pohl 14y ago
  A was looking into digital pianos recently to see how far along the technology has come. The extent to which they go to try to capture the nuances of a real piano took me by surprise. You know how when you depress the pedal on a piano (without playing) the dampers lifting from the strings causes them to quietly ring a little bit? They model that now. You know how if you quietly depress a key to keep a single damper open, and then loudly strike a staccato note in the bass, how the first note resonates with some harmonics from the bass note? They're modeling that now too. They used to try to save memory by not sampling the entire decay of a note (after some amount of decay, they would start looping a brief sample, playing it little quieter each iteration). Now they sample the entire decay, because memory is cheap enough. Here are some videos of the one that caught my eye: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdVf-fwCRSE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdVf-fwCRSE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k77nDTIWkeA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k77nDTIWkeA I'm tempted to go try to play some. It would be very nice to not have to pay for periodic tunings.
ballard 14y ago
"In other news... Ikea now offers an upright piano: only 37 flats and 19 hours of assembly."
aidenn0 14y ago
Having moved several pianos, I definitely get the enjoyment of being able to destroy one. Ususally about 80% of the way through the move "accidentally" dropping it seems like a good idea...
lgleason 14y ago
At least Top Gear will have a ample supply of pianos to drop on cars :).
sspencer 14y ago
Looks like plenty of opportunities for more installation pieces like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/us/28piano.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/us/28piano.html
cygwin98 14y ago
Acoustic pianos are dying and losing to digital pianos. It's a trend just like film camera lost to digital camera. No tuning required.
- ivancdg 14y ago
  Nothing could be further from the truth. Your metaphor is specious. (Sorry if that sounds harsh, it is intended more to be just a firm statement). The complexity of the piano sound is very, very difficult to duplicate, although we've been trying for decades. There is no question that electric pianos are more practical for certain situations (country houses in climates with high humidity, for example). But those are exceptions where practical concerns outweigh aesthetics (like watching a DVD on your laptop on the train). A fine, hand-made acoustic piano has no serious contenders at the moment, from the viewpoint of both the musician, and the sophisticated listener. One could argue that fine, hand-made instruments are becoming more rare because they are more expensive to produce and the market has shrunk, but that is a different argument.
  - cygwin98 14y ago
    That's OK. You can have your opinion. A fine film camera has no serious contenders at the moment, from the viewpoint of both the photographers, and the sophisticated viewer Some professional photographers said basically the same thing on film vs digital cameras a decade ago. See what do we have now. I can even predict that in ten years Steinway will bankrupt like what Kodak did. The complexity of the piano sound is very, very difficult to duplicate, although we've been trying for decades. As a programmer, I especially disagree with this point. The challenges digital pianos face right now is the key-touching not the sound itself.
    - fr0sty 14y ago
      > I can even predict that in ten years Steinway will bankrupt like what Kodak did. I'll take the other side of that bet.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
gary2012 14y ago
I guess the golden lining of the story is that it’s not that people have stopped playing, they just switched to electronic keyboards for ease and expense reduction. Always sad to see old technology go away. (ie anyone read a hard copy of a book lately?)
stcredzero 14y ago
> Instead of spending hundreds or thousands to repair an old piano, you can buy a new one made in China that’s just as good Has happened to a number of instruments. http://amzn.com/B003UHLH0C http://amzn.com/B003UHLH0C There should be an opportunity here for leasing non-digital pianos, given some technical solution that solves the transportation problem. (Perhaps something like a PODS transporter? Composite frame?) The size of the disposal problem is a big pain point. Carbon fiber composite pianos might represent a significant advance. Such composites are stiff enough to avoid much of the "settling" of a metal and wood structure under such immense compression and cantilever loads. (Carbon fiber composites are so stiff, they caused Boeing some problems with their newest plane. Instead of tolerances resulting in the gradual bending and settling of metal parts into place, the slightly mismatched carbon fiber parts maintained their stresses.) This property would significantly reduce the labor costs of tuning.
- klodolph 14y ago
  There exist pianos with carbon fiber sound boards. They advertise increased tuning stability and reduced sensitivity to environmental conditions. I don't know how they sound. The advertisements say that they have "increased sustain", "a brighter harmonic spectrum", and a "much wider dynamic range", but to me, all of these sound like downsides. The dynamic range of some pianos is already too large, increased sustain beyond current levels makes everything sound muddy, and "brighter" could mean "harsher". For the same reasons, people are reluctant to replace wooden parts of other instruments with newer materials. I'd be willing to buy one, but I'd definitely have to play it first.
- fr0sty 14y ago
  > you can buy a new one made in China that’s just as good. This is rather debatable. I would rather have a restored piano from an established manufacturer than a shiny new one from an untested brand at the same price.

107 points by dangoldin 14y ago

DannoHung 14y ago

Something about throwing out musical instruments bothers me... the same way as it does with books.

maxerickson 14y ago
I wonder how similar the act is? Lots and lots of books are crap that is printed on cheap paper for sale in airports, and I don't see much reason to lament tossing such a thing (especially if it is damaged). I suppose you should take care to not extend the sentiment to finely crafted foods.
udp 14y ago
It's pretty horrible if you lose a hand-made instrument, because even if it was insured, you're never going to play something that plays exactly the same again. (This happened to me a few weeks ago with a flute.)
bgutierrez 14y ago
I know exactly what you mean. Then I worked at Barnes and Noble where we tore the covers off of mass markets that couldn't sell to send back to the publisher and discarded the rest of the book. Every now and then a decent book would go into this pile (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, once) but the vast majority of time it was harlequins and similar stuff that was churned out for indiscriminate tastes. Imagine whole garbage cans of this stuff. Stuff that would be replaced the following day and then thrown out the following month. Sometimes books simply aren't worth the shelf space. I eventually felt the same about a $50 guitar that I bought out of musiciansfriend catalogue when I was 16. Tuning pegs that wouldn't sit still, poorly aligned frets… the rosette was printed onto a piece of paper. It's hard to believe that something as beautiful as a musical instrument could be built so poorly.

fredley 14y ago

I expect this is largely due to the prevalence of decent-enough quality digital pianos. A school or church no longer needs to deal with a second-hand honky-tonk that needs maintenance and tuning (not to mention several people to move) - they can get a passable digital for a few hundred bucks. The only market for real pianos these days is with serious professionals, concert venues, and people who use them as furniture.

mechanical_fish 14y ago
The implication of this article is that even the furniture market is limited. You can get some very nice vintage-looking completely unplayable pianos from a Craigslist ad. I also wouldn't say that a real piano is only for a serious pro. Real pianos are a different instrument from keyboards; I wanted one within two weeks of starting piano lessons. But that brings us to the other half of the equation: New pianos are relatively inexpensive, because manufacturing is increasingly efficient. It's more cost-effective to buy new than to take a chance on rehabilitating a piano from 1962. EDIT: Incidentally, when I say "relatively inexpensive", I mean "for a piano". There's a very real temptation to stick with electronic keyboards. The temptation is measured in kilodollars.
- fredley 14y ago
  Nothing is the same, it's true, but for serious practise a digital can be better. The key response and weighting will be consistent (good luck getting that with an old instrument) and the tuning spot on. I used to be a sceptic, but playing the latest digitals which acoustically model the soundboard, strings and action of a piano, the experience is very impressive. It genuinely does feel like playing the real thing, even if the sound comes through speakers. If I come to buy my own piano, I'd go digital.
  - dman 14y ago
    Any recommendations for digital?
    - 14y ago

mechanical_fish 14y ago

Larry Fine's Piano Book is an interesting read. The take-home lesson is that pianos are far more fragile than they look. They are continuously falling apart. Poor humidity and temperature control takes its toll on them, the soundboard wears out, the tuning pegs wear out, all of that felt most definitely ages and wears out and stiffens, they're full of moving parts, and even letting them get too far out of tune will damage them long-term. Most of those eighty-year-old instruments really aren't worth keeping, and if you want your instrument to live to be eighty in good condition you need to budget for ongoing maintenance, and then eventually get the thing torn down and rebuilt. It's like owning a car. It's hard, though, because I remember playing with my late grandmother's piano when I was around five years old, and now it's probably in a landfill somewhere. On the other hand, I still have my grandfather's slide rule, which he took to meteorology school at MIT during World War II. The secret is to choose highly portable mementoes of a bygone technological era. ;)

fredley 14y ago
This is very true. Honestly, even the best-kept instrument degrades significantly over time. When's the last time you saw anything but a brand new instrument in a big concert? There's a reason you never see pros playing treasured vintage instruments the way a violinist would. Aside from their historical or ornamental value as furniture, old pianos are pretty useless.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  > There's a reason you never see pros playing treasured vintage instruments the way a violinist would. I don't understand. Violins are instruments too. Did you just mean pianos, or others too?
  - pnathan 14y ago
    Pianos don't improve with age. A decently constructed instrument in the violin family will, as will (to a lesser extent) brass instruments. I don't have a particular set of citations, it's just musician lore.
  - 14y ago

cfinke 14y ago

A piano that has not been regularly tuned will lose its ability to stay tuned, turning it into a very large and heavy place to display sheet music, just like a car that never gets an oil change will eventually become an immobile scrap metal sculpture. Shortly after we got married, my wife and I took possession of a 1918 upright piano that had not been tuned in a long time. We didn't know enough about pianos to know better, so we spent considerable time and effort to transport it 40 miles and up a short flight of stairs into our new home... only to dismantle it by hand less than a year later and slowly throw it away. It couldn't be tuned, and it took up too much room to keep if it wasn't going to be played. I think we sold the cast iron soundboard as scrap for a few dollars, and I did save some of the larger pieces of wood, which I used to build a bed for my two-year old son a few years later. As a side note, if you've never taken apart a piano, I highly recommend it. You get a specific understanding of its inner workings, even if you think you already know how it functions. Pictures of the piano disassembly: With the keyboard removed: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2193/2299985304_d0b38313f6_b.jpg http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2193/2299985304_d0b38313f6_b.j... The keys that I saved for a long time but never found a use for: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2091/2299984652_a024f4a05e_b.jpg http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2091/2299984652_a024f4a05e_b.j... (They're like teeth that have been knocked out: much much longer than you'd expect.) The soundboard exposed, and the huge screwdriver I had to buy (see the top of the photo) to remove the screws attaching it to the wooden back: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3105/2300002756_92e8503676_b.jpg http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3105/2300002756_92e8503676_b.j... The soundboard removed: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2217/2300002188_68c614d900_b.jpg http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2217/2300002188_68c614d900_b.j... Just a portion of the screws and other hardware holding it together: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2095/2299206761_ae640697d9_b.jpg http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2095/2299206761_ae640697d9_b.j...

roqetman 14y ago
I've taken apart a couple of discarded pianos. The saddest part is cutting the wires with a wire cutter (watch it, they whip outward) - the sound is so mournful and haunting.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago

dugmartin 14y ago

From the classifieds and Craigslist listings around here I'd say the value of upright pianos is actually negative. They are offered as free as long as you agree to move them. We bought our kids an old used full-sized keyboard (Technics P-30). It is an older model but it sounds nice and most importantly, the kids can practice with headphones on, saving the sanity of others in the house.

lotharbot 14y ago
> "I'd say the value of upright pianos is actually negative." We just got rid of my parents' old upright piano, which had been abused by all of us kids for decades, but was still almost perfectly in tune. It was definitely negative value. It was heavy and taking up valuable space. It cost almost $200 to get piano movers to take it to salvage / the dump. So if someone had taken it for free, we would have been ecstatic. (Also, our Technics SX-PX552 does the job just fine.)

UrLicht 14y ago

I once bought a beater piano for $200 so I could practice tuning it. We didn't have room in our apartment, so a friend let us set it up in his and I'd come over once in a while and bang on it (thanks, Eric!). Most of the weight of a piano comes from the cast iron frame inside that holds the >20 tons of tension from the strings. And this piano was no exception - it was an "upright grand" meaning it was as tall as a baby grand is long. It took six of us to cajole it up my friend's stairs. So when moving time came for him and his wife we had to decide what to do with the piano. None of us wanted to move the damn thing again, and since I really didn't have an emotional attachment to it whatsoever, we came up with the next best idea - cut it to pieces with a sawzall. And like another commenter said, if you ever have the opportunity to do this, do it. It was pretty fun. There's nothing quite like the sound of taking wire cutters to a fully tense piano string.

cperciva 14y ago
There's nothing quite like the sound of taking wire cutters to a fully tense piano string. ... as long as you're careful about it. I know musicians who have been injured by being in the wrong place when a string snapped.

digitalsushi 14y ago

I am not a piano player, or even an official player of any musical instrument. I don't know how to read music. A year ago, we were offered an upright Kimball built in 1970 by my newly acquired in-laws. My father in law is a portly fellow and insisted we move it ourselves, but I instead paid exactly 300 dollars to have it moved the 14 miles from Exeter to Lee. We let it adjust to the humidity in our house for a half a year, and then we paid exactly 175 dollars to have it tuned. As subjective as this is, the man who tuned it said "it was a D and now it is a B". He said that the Kimballs are a very cheap piano with a cheap sound, and tried to sell me a grand piano for 5000 dollars used. It would have required I vacate my home office to the basement. He had other pianos for sale, and some were as affordable (but as cheap) as the 300 dollars I paid for a free piano. It's immensely pleasurable having a piano next to where I program. I don't know what I am doing, but I suspect this is a lot of the allure - I sit there and poke, and figure out my programming challenge of the day while my fingers are occupied. We all know full well how the frontal lobe needs to be engaged for the "coprocessor" to have a chance at resolving our issues for us. The piano is about 4 feet wide and barely 2 feet from the wall. Since the bench sits underneath, this is frankly not a huge investment in space. I recommend a piano highly to the non-player due to its affordability and its distraction properties, my own version of prayer beads I use while debugging in my head.

gjulianm 14y ago
You're talking about upright pianos... Affordability? Talking with other piano players, here in Spain you can't find a decent piano under 1000€. And, if you're going to buy a crappy piano for "getting distracted" that won't last more than 10 years, better search for a digital one: for the same price of a crappy piano you can get a pretty decent digital keyboard that will fit your needs (and will occupy even less space).
philbarr 14y ago
Fantastic! As a piano player myself I find that all too often we get tied up in theory or practice routines or grades. Sometimes you've just got to PLAY THE DAMNED THING. Sort of applies to programming as well if you see what I mean.
14y ago

zefhous 14y ago

The better pianos (Steinway, Mason & Hamlin) from the 1920s are actually still very valuable and in demand. A well kept or restored grand piano from that era costs > $20,000 and can be one of the best deals out there for a good instrument. But any low end piano — even one that's only 15-20 years old — is destined for the dumpster before long. There are two problems that cause this: 1. Lack of craftsmanship in the original instrument. 2. The expense and lack of skilled labor to restore and regulate pianos. It's just too expensive and time consuming to have a skilled technician work on a low-quality piano, and because they are not made well in the first place, they just won't stay well-regulated for long. Because of this, even a relatively new and good looking piano doesn't make a great instrument once it gets past a certain point. This is a common problem in music schools. Most of the pianos are in poor condition and the technicians can't keep up with keeping them in good shape, and the good pianos are generally locked up and only the piano majors have access to them. Only high end pianos are worth putting any time and money into, and because of that they actually make a good investment, while the value of low end pianos just drops off a cliff and they end up in a dumpster because they aren't even worth moving and repairing.

EzGraphs 14y ago

Very sad to me. Digital pianos are a great innovation in many respects but are sort of analogous to microwave ovens in cooking. Work well enough to be widely adopted, but are unlikely ever to be the means of producing a masterpiece. The relative lack of (touch) sensitivity and the more limited variation in timbre are immediately noticeable. One of the other qualities of a traditional piano that I instantly miss in even the best digital simulations is sympathetic vibration. Holding the sustain pedal down will not simply allow the notes to play longer. Other strings that freed up begin to vibrate as well. It produces an effect that - the last I checked - is not well emulated in a digital environment. Reflective of the values of our age I guess. Small, relatively portable, low maintenance wins out in many other arenas. Why not music...

crazygringo 14y ago
You're talking about keyboards, not digital pianos. I currently use a Yamaha P155. The keys are weighted and touch-sensitive just like a real piano. Each key has its own recording, with its own timbre, at different volume levels. I can even use a damper pedal which responds to have far down I've pushed it. It's not exactly the same as a real piano, but as someone who played a real piano for 10 years, it's damned close. It's not like moving from a gas stove to a microwave, it's like moving from a gas stove to an electric stove. Not quite the same, but for nearly all practical purposes, it's good enough -- and wearing headphones in your apartment so your neighbors don't hate you, it just wins.
- Dove 14y ago
  I have something similar, and I agree -- a quality digital piano is almost as good as the real thing. In some ways better: it never needs tuned, and the gentler touch is easy on the fingers. I will admit, though, when I want thunder, there's no substitute for real strings.
pohl 14y ago
A was looking into digital pianos recently to see how far along the technology has come. The extent to which they go to try to capture the nuances of a real piano took me by surprise. You know how when you depress the pedal on a piano (without playing) the dampers lifting from the strings causes them to quietly ring a little bit? They model that now. You know how if you quietly depress a key to keep a single damper open, and then loudly strike a staccato note in the bass, how the first note resonates with some harmonics from the bass note? They're modeling that now too. They used to try to save memory by not sampling the entire decay of a note (after some amount of decay, they would start looping a brief sample, playing it little quieter each iteration). Now they sample the entire decay, because memory is cheap enough. Here are some videos of the one that caught my eye: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdVf-fwCRSE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdVf-fwCRSE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k77nDTIWkeA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k77nDTIWkeA I'm tempted to go try to play some. It would be very nice to not have to pay for periodic tunings.

ballard 14y ago

"In other news... Ikea now offers an upright piano: only 37 flats and 19 hours of assembly."

aidenn0 14y ago

Having moved several pianos, I definitely get the enjoyment of being able to destroy one. Ususally about 80% of the way through the move "accidentally" dropping it seems like a good idea...

lgleason 14y ago

At least Top Gear will have a ample supply of pianos to drop on cars :).

sspencer 14y ago

Looks like plenty of opportunities for more installation pieces like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/us/28piano.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/us/28piano.html

cygwin98 14y ago

Acoustic pianos are dying and losing to digital pianos. It's a trend just like film camera lost to digital camera. No tuning required.

ivancdg 14y ago
Nothing could be further from the truth. Your metaphor is specious. (Sorry if that sounds harsh, it is intended more to be just a firm statement). The complexity of the piano sound is very, very difficult to duplicate, although we've been trying for decades. There is no question that electric pianos are more practical for certain situations (country houses in climates with high humidity, for example). But those are exceptions where practical concerns outweigh aesthetics (like watching a DVD on your laptop on the train). A fine, hand-made acoustic piano has no serious contenders at the moment, from the viewpoint of both the musician, and the sophisticated listener. One could argue that fine, hand-made instruments are becoming more rare because they are more expensive to produce and the market has shrunk, but that is a different argument.
- cygwin98 14y ago
  That's OK. You can have your opinion. A fine film camera has no serious contenders at the moment, from the viewpoint of both the photographers, and the sophisticated viewer Some professional photographers said basically the same thing on film vs digital cameras a decade ago. See what do we have now. I can even predict that in ten years Steinway will bankrupt like what Kodak did. The complexity of the piano sound is very, very difficult to duplicate, although we've been trying for decades. As a programmer, I especially disagree with this point. The challenges digital pianos face right now is the key-touching not the sound itself.
  - fr0sty 14y ago
    > I can even predict that in ten years Steinway will bankrupt like what Kodak did. I'll take the other side of that bet.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

gary2012 14y ago

I guess the golden lining of the story is that it’s not that people have stopped playing, they just switched to electronic keyboards for ease and expense reduction. Always sad to see old technology go away. (ie anyone read a hard copy of a book lately?)

stcredzero 14y ago

> Instead of spending hundreds or thousands to repair an old piano, you can buy a new one made in China that’s just as good Has happened to a number of instruments. http://amzn.com/B003UHLH0C http://amzn.com/B003UHLH0C There should be an opportunity here for leasing non-digital pianos, given some technical solution that solves the transportation problem. (Perhaps something like a PODS transporter? Composite frame?) The size of the disposal problem is a big pain point. Carbon fiber composite pianos might represent a significant advance. Such composites are stiff enough to avoid much of the "settling" of a metal and wood structure under such immense compression and cantilever loads. (Carbon fiber composites are so stiff, they caused Boeing some problems with their newest plane. Instead of tolerances resulting in the gradual bending and settling of metal parts into place, the slightly mismatched carbon fiber parts maintained their stresses.) This property would significantly reduce the labor costs of tuning.

klodolph 14y ago
There exist pianos with carbon fiber sound boards. They advertise increased tuning stability and reduced sensitivity to environmental conditions. I don't know how they sound. The advertisements say that they have "increased sustain", "a brighter harmonic spectrum", and a "much wider dynamic range", but to me, all of these sound like downsides. The dynamic range of some pianos is already too large, increased sustain beyond current levels makes everything sound muddy, and "brighter" could mean "harsher". For the same reasons, people are reluctant to replace wooden parts of other instruments with newer materials. I'd be willing to buy one, but I'd definitely have to play it first.
fr0sty 14y ago
> you can buy a new one made in China that’s just as good. This is rather debatable. I would rather have a restored piano from an established manufacturer than a shiny new one from an untested brand at the same price.