Piano buying

[maize]

This isn't in my immediate future but if I can get my budget under control I want to save up for a piano. Pianos are popular here and there are a ton on the local classifieds list--all the way from free banged up uprights to baby grands and grands in the several thousand dollar range.

 

I want a good quality instrument. Don't care if it is pretty.

 

What makes a good piano? Are baby grands preferable to a good quality upright?

 

We have a very beat up spinnet piano that I tune myself with the help of a fancy piano tuning app. It is workable but doesn't have a great sound. I want something better than this.

[KrissiK]

We bought a piano a couple years ago. We bought it it used from a reputable dealer. I will repeat the advice he gave us. He said be very careful to buy used from a private party - like off Craigslist or a classified. You have no idea what you are getting and you can bring it home and find it unsalvageable. He said he buys used pianos, but he’s very picky and buys only ones he knows are still in good shape. We got a nice Spalding studio piano for $1500. It came with a free first tuning and we have it tuned every year by the same guy. We have been very happy with our instrument,

[StephanieZ]

If you have room, a baby grand makes a better sound than an upright, and a full size grand makes an even better sound. Space is generally the limiting factor. IME, players don't "need" a grand (or baby grand) until they are close to an advanced level. (Note, you don't want to crowd an overly large piano in a small room . . . or it won't sound right . . . Google up guidelines if that might be an issue.)

 

We got a grand piano (they come in all sizes, and ours is just a foot or so longer than a baby grand) a couple years ago for dd15 (then 13) -- she's a very serious and capable pianist and had already been taking serious lessons for about 6 years at that point. She was "ready" musically to really get value out of a big, fancy piano, and we finally (after an addition) had the space, so we bit the bullet. A friend happened upon it during the course of his work -- a local woman who was selling off most of her possessions (midlife crisis?) including a 40k piano that was only 3 years old and in pristine shape . . . because her ex-boyfriend had bought it for her and the memories weren't good . . . And so we sort of happened in to the opportunity at just the right time. 

 

You can often get decent or even very nice pianos for free. Just because they are being given away for free doesn't mean they aren't lovely. We got our first two (upright) pianos for free, and both were great. The second one was re-homed (again for free) when we bought the grand piano. There's just not a great market for selling used modest pianos and they take up a lot of room (and can't be safely stored in an unclimate controlled space such as a garage . . . that was the downfall of our first free piano), and so sometimes folks just want to get rid of them. 

 

Your best bet to find a good used piano is to ask a good piano teacher to help you check them out. Since dd had been studying with the same teacher for years, we had her check out the grand piano that we were interested in. She also suggested we have the piano tuner/repair expert (that is FT employed by the local university in their music department) evaluate it as well, so we paid him to do that, too. (This was a 16k+ purchase, which was a great deal, but still a huge amount of money, so we were being very prudent . . .)

 

Note that piano maintenance/repairs can be anything from routine tuning ($200-300 each time, approximately once a year, but always after a move, and would likely need more frequent tunes to restore a piano that hasn't been tuned regularly) to repairs that are so expensive as to be totally financially unfeasible (more than the cost of a new piano). So, be careful about investing too much if you haven't had it checked out. 

 

Many times, if people are giving away (or even selling) a piano, they will require you use a professional piano mover to remove it from their home. We've done that for both the first free piano as well as the more recent grand piano (duh, no way we'd try to move that one!). This is both to protect the piano from damage before it is actually out of the seller's house and also to protect the seller's house from damage . . . and to prevent liability concerns if the self-moving-folks drop the piano on a person mid-move in the seller's house or yard . . . IIRC, it's about 200 to move an upright and closer to 300-500 for a grand piano (local moves, obviously). Just call moving companies and ask . . . Or ask your local piano teacher who does it . . . (Having helped self-move uprights a few times and watching piano movers do their thing . . . I'd require a professional moving company move any piano out of my house unless I knew the buyer super-duper well and had an easy house to move it out of with no stairs or doorway issues.)

 

So, anyway, I'd suggest finding a local piano teacher who'd be willing to let you hire her/him to help you find and assess pianos. Lesson rates are typically 50-100/hr, so I'd just ask if you could pay the teacher's going lesson hourly rate for their time. 

 

Edited December 31, 2017 by StephanieZ