Looking for A Suitable Piano?

If a student shows promise at playing the piano, ensuring this emerging talent has room to grow and that the motivation to progress is properly encouraged, discussions about suitable pianos are very much part of the zone. A starter piano is just that: it will get a young player started. A keen and talented student who has to work with a 'starter piano' will constantly be fighting frustration and discouragement as they try play 'with feeling' a piano that has as much delicacy as a bulldozer!

Piano Exams mark the student's progress through to competent musicianship. The higher grades, obviously demand greater ability than the lower grades but there is a corresponding suitability gap between a piano that is just good enough for the elementary grades and one that is built to handle for the more advanced grades.

The world of pianos is thick with variations on a theme of good and bad: good tone, bad action; good action, bad tone; light touch; heavy touch; responsive; unresponsive; bright tone; mellow tone; brand new; worn out; playable; unplayable! The list is endless. No sane person would ever try to document every aspect of every piano ever made. However, in a subtle and informal way, the pianos we encounter help us to make judgements and form preferences that reflect our tastes and style of playing.

There is no list of pianos that could be the definitive guide to suitable pianos. Guidelines and statistics are all a list can offer. Due to the nature of pianos no two of them are alike. Even statistical facts are no proof or guarantee of satisfaction or suitability. Any tuner will have met with many good people who's piano purchases have gone wrong... 'but we were told it was in good working order!'

Choosing a suitable piano will always come down to the best value-for-money piano on offer. Get as much advice as you can find. Talk to your tuner. Pin-point as clearly as you can what you are looking for in a piano, e.g. tone, responsiveness of action, casework etc. Happy hunting!

© Steve Burden

State of Pianos in Schools

It is too easy for school administrators who are asked to make budget savings, to focus their attention on the fund of money used for the tuning and maintenance of the pianos. There is obviously, no visible difference to the pianos if they are tuned or not. There will be an audible difference, but if the administrators are tone deaf, an out-of-tune piano is not going to bother them anyway. 

Financial management, for any institution is extremely important, but what makes good sense on a spreadsheet on the finance office computer can be nonsense in the practice rooms. Pianos were once bought by schools as assets, but somehow their value to the budget-makers has fallen to the point where they are now considered a liability. So much for good asset management!

There can be very few people who do not understand the need for institutions to make savings wherever possible. The conflicts of interest that remain after waste has been addressed, will always create problems. 

During separate conversations with a couple of piano teachers recently, the state of pianos in schools was mentioned. At one, high-end, fee-paying school they feel so poor they can no longer afford to have the pianos tuned each term, and so have them tuned once a year. Another school does not usually bother to tune the piano used for the Associated Board Piano Exams. If they do, they seem to look for and accept the cheapest quote they could find!

There could well be a generation of piano-playing students who may never know what a properly tuned piano sounds like. A look at some of the piano recitals and demos that are uploaded to Youtube is enough to demonstrate that there are many who seem oblivious to the howling sound of an out-of-tune piano! 

In term time, many school pianos are played constantly. Tuning stability is impossible if such a piano is tuned only once a year. The tuner can only play a game of catch-up! Because the piano was in such a poor state of tune before tuning, it is not going to stay in good tune for very long after the tuning. This is frustrating for the teacher, the students and the tuner.

Giving children cheap food is no way to plan for a strong future generation. If piano playing is to survive for the next generation, the budget-makers should give the tuning and maintenance of school pianos a much higher priority than has become normal over the last two decades.

© Steve Burden