And the bench is included." Within a week I had a check for the replacement cost and bought a new one!ģ.Moving Pianos – Curtis Music – Yes that’s me in the shorts (a very long time ago) How To Move A Piano
He turned to me and said, "Well, it looks like it is a total loss. This unnerved him such that he dropped his metal Polaroid camera on the bench (the only undamaged part of the piano). I told him I'd have to file suit in court and would have the Baldwin dealer to testify as my expert. I knew others from his office from auto wrecks I handled. The insurance adjuster who knew nothing about pianos came to inspect.
The sound board had cracked and the keys reminded me of that song"Over The Waves". They took it on up to my living room to lie in state. When I was much younger I was moving from one apt to another and the moving company dropped my 42" Baldwin on its back. It needed to be put down with a ball bat and 3 attendees needed lithium abd Thorazine injections to recover from the insufferable sound!Ģ. They had an upright spinet with missing front, no bench, and its last tuning had to have been 25 yrs before. I was invited to play for a fundraising reception for a local mental health org at an major insurance company Hdq. And the smell around me was indescribable: A litter box in a bordello. The Steinway, basically, sounded like a prepared piano the damper pedal squeaked and honked. Needless to say, the program I played that evening was a horror-show. Don't worry: we'll pour perfume over it when it dries." "Years and years of cat pee re-activated by the soaked carpet. Heaters with fans were under the instrument pouring out blast-furnace heat to dry the carpeting under the piano and the soundboard.Īnd there was this STENCH. When I went to the folks's house that morning to try out the piano, the housekeeper was frantically blowing hair dryers into the piano's saturated guts. Worse yet, the day before I played, a water pipe broke in a bathroom the floor above and doused the piano but good, just beneath it. They bought it as furniture, so it was never voiced, regulated, etc. Scheduled some years ago to do a recital run-through at the home of some rich folk with a Steinway M. I won't play their boomy listless Yamaha, so they play their boring choice of repretoire without me. Rather than donate it, we took an auto body grinder, some safety glasses, and a power saw, and cut up in small enough pieces to fit in the trash can over several weeks.īy contrast, the church has a very competent Hamilton that that won't let me play because the veneer is cracked on the front. When I opened it up to see whatdis? some hammer shafts were bent over to where the hammer wasn't even hitting the right three strings. I think they were the cheap version of the Kimball, which was a decent sounding console with no durability (try one in the Army Base officer's or NCO's club sometimes, usually totally worn out) The Winter I tried to help tune was a spinet a friend had, no dynamic range at all, no repeat key velocity, and more than one note sounded at once on some keys.
He must have been really something, because these things are frequently listed on craigslist with a starting price of $1200. Some super salesmen covered Louisville in Winter Pianos a couple of decades ago. It was universally agreed upon after the recital that the piano was terrible was never to be used again by our music department. Speaking of the pedals, for some reason they were unusually high off the floor, meaning every time I had to lift my foot off the pedal, I had to physically lift my entire foot off the floor. The keys were clunky and difficult to press, and every time I used the damper pedal, the keys shifted noticeably. It was old, not tuned (at least, not very well), and the loudest I could achieve from it was probably a mezzo-forte (which pains me, because I've always been complimented for my expressiveness and use of dynamics).
The venue had the aforementioned piano, which we used. My school at the time only had courses for traditional band instruments, but since I was in grade 9 piano at the time, the music teacher invited me (well, more like volunteered me) to perform on the piano at the annual performing arts recital, even though piano wasn't part of the curriculum back then. I remember playing this terrible, clunky upright piano for a high school recital.