A test of your ingenuity and sense of humor.

Let's see:
I just accidentally bought a 10' Fazioli
Larry Fine rankings for 1900
My Acrosonic plays like a truck!
The very last Hailun thread
Buttery actions
New diet for Piano Legs
The new vibrating piano benches
Piano Oxymorons(Budget AlmaTadema, Mahogany Kawai Blak,...)

Grand spinet (true story; my eyebrows went up when the customer made the appointment, but when I got there, it was made by the Grand Piano Co. of NC).

When was my 1987 Baldwin built?

Lester spinet or Ravenscroft 9'?

It seems easy -- I'm going to cast my own plate!

Is being underwater bad for a piano?

I put non-Steinway music on the music desk: is it still a Steinway?

--Cy--

News: Bosendorfer buys Brodmann

My fish fell under the strings, what's the best way to get him back? Please hurry.

Need a good tech, want to fit accordion-style chord buttons to my SK7.

I love my bench, but it is fixed height..Do they make pianos with adjustable legs?

Do they make disc player piano recordings that are kind of lousy so people think it is me playing?


Can I make my roll-up piano sound like a Steinway?

I don't know why, but that response made me laugh for five minutes. Thanks, djtoast.

I agree. Hilarious. I have never heard of this actually happening, but finding dead birds and worse in pianos is not uncommon.

Or dead cats. I have heard of stuff like that. When a grands lid, or even uprights lid is open, sometimes a cat or similar will crawl in there and get stuck!

- News: Sauter bought Samick

- How do I get my cat post videos of me playing the piano?

- What kind of liquid is okay to spill on the piano?

- Help - I want to be a 5000 post club member!

"My piano hunt is on. How to prevent collateral damage on the forum?"

"How to change the decal on my piaao without affecting the sound?" [preferably to be posted in the Tuners-tech forum]

schwammerl.

"Am I progressing too fast? Learning to play piano seems like it should be harder!"

Of course we would all hate this person...

this thread is like the best and the worst of the internet

I would like to see the following thread topic:

My piano is too loud, how can I make myself a bit deaf?

My piano playing is too loud. Where can I move my neighbors so they won't complain?

Cy, I was told by someone who used to work for the Grand Piano Company that the whole idea behind this piano was to give their dealers the ability to advertise "Grand pianos on sale for $295 (or whatever)." I don't know whether or not this was actually true—i.e., a business plan—but I do remember dealers advertising "Grand" pianos on sale for ridiculously low prices. With no mention, of course, that the Grand’s were spinets. Anything, I guess, to get the gullible in the door.

ddf

I think my piano is haunted. Where can I find a piano exorcist?

M

"Ok so I soaked my hammers in glue because they were too soft.... now what?"

"Whats a good substitute for a grand piano leg?"

"They told me it was ok to have my singer lay on the piano and it broke!"


Im not sure but those are kind of lame!

That's easy. Just let earwax build up in your ear. Or you can make your piano louder by having it removed.

"My grand won't fit through the door. Would a running start help?"

Call Turandot, he has an eloquent answer for everything.

...and perhaps adding, "And where can I purchase a kevlar vest?"

"Please help me, I was carefully moving my grand piano and the back leg has fallen 18 inches into the floor furnace vent and the back of the piano has crashed through the picture window. How can I elevate the back legs of my bench so the angle of the bench matches the slant of my piano?"

(more realistic than I'm willing to admit right now)

If you had been playing piano for that ensemble on the Titanic... would you have kept playing?

Of course, what better way to spend the last minutes of your life? Maybe a song about Los Angle-es

These piano keys are too hard to push down. Can you make them light like my home spinet organ? And while you're at it, what happened to the piano's volume pedal?

How many keys have to be removed for a beginning player?

Brandon, already got a suggestion for one of your questions " Get a smaller singer or a bigger piano.

"How do I know when my cat is ready to move up to a grand? He's been playing for 2 years now and is currently working on Fur Elise."

The only thing grand about them was the cheap little name plate that says "GRAND" on it. I see them advertised on Craigslist all the time. My temptation is to email the seller and tell them they should be paying $500 to have it hauled away and disposed of. Of the many deplorable pianos (and I use that term to mean PSO) I've had the displeasure of playing "GRAND" spinets are amongst the shoddiest.

I've played a few "grand" spinets at a local piano store / warehouse (they were part of the rental fleet), and while I can't quite say they were my favorite spinets ever (I'd take an Acrosonic or Wurlitzer over them any day), I am wondering... what is so bad about them? I've heard stories of some technicians servicing "deplorable old spinets", and from the descriptions I heard, I was expecting that when I actually PLAYED a "grand" spinet, it would be MUCH worse than it actually was.
For example, among some things I was expecting:
* inharmonicity in excess of 150-200¢ at the places where the inharmonicity normally goes up
* sustain in the bass audible for a maximum of about 2 seconds (and down 40dB from the peak after 1/4 second), after which, for a few seconds, you may be able to see the string vibrating, but couldn't hear anything (not even harmonics)
* bass bridge mounted on the wrong side of the soundboard cutoff bar
backscale so short that the leftover string after making the hitch pin loop actually extends some distance into the speaking length, which itself is under 24" or so
* one of the following (don't know which would be worse, but I wouldn't like either of them in a scale that small): plain trichords down to about C2 or so, OR, wrapped bichords up to at least A4, with an octave and a half of severely foreshortened plain trichords on an extreme hockey stick bridge (maybe a 1.05x difference in speaking length between the first plain trichord and the one an octave up)
* action so poorly designed that even when it is regulated to perform its best, it has a dynamic range of about 3dB, can only repeat notes twice per second or so, and so on...
hammers that are so bad (besides the deplorable non-sustain in the bass) that there is NO harmonic structure to the notes - no, I don't quite mean muffled, but even when they're voiced to their maximum potential, they just sound blah, for lack of a better way to describe it.
so poorly designed, structurally, that even if you were to completely rebuild the piano, it would still be worse than an old upright with a cracked soundboard, pinblock, bridge, etc... (for example, tuning stability, while it might stay in tune long enough for the technician to get paid and leave, would be out upwards of 100¢ or more within a few hours)
Well, if I thought of it more, I could probably come up with more descriptions of the "worst piano ever", but I think you get the idea.

However, in reality, the "grand" spinets I have encountered played and sounded like a Rubenstein R-371, compared to what I had been expecting. So where ARE these absolutely horrible pianos?