The online New York Times have Solo piano, a short video of a piano left at a curb in NYC. All pianos are good, digital or acoustic, because they are made to be played. Ironically, NYC for the most part are apartments and what that means is that the world complains if they hear a piano being played, so the introduction of digtal pianos have a special place that is safe. The piano in the video is special, too, because it represents the awesome sound and feel of pianos though history. It will be interesting to see how history unfolds. Digital pianos run on electricity and as the whole world ulimately completely runs on electricity how unaffordable will electricity become - remember today some people are trying to run autos on electricity. So in the end will acoustic pianos be cheaper to play than a digital?

I just watched that video (it's poignant, well worth watching: see here ).

I think that if you factor in the costs of maintaining an acoustic piano (two tunings a year), it is unlikely for acoustics to be cheaper to play than digitals for quite some time. But--who knows?--we may enter some sort of dystopian period where there is no electricity (I've been watching too much Revolution, I think). But if that's the case, I'm guessing that the relative expense of playing the piano will be far from our minds.

I do like the fact that whenever we have power outages, I can still play my piano.

You'll still be able to play digital pianos when there's no electricity... you just won't be able to hear them.

(Sorry, just had to write it!)

Perhaps pedalling will take on a new meaning in future pianos. We already have wind up torches...

I always want to stop and play an abandoned piano. An abandoned keyboard is never connected so I don't try those.

I found the video somehow disturbing. Not sure why it seems necessary to resort to destruction and violence in the end.

OMG! That was so sad


A while ago my colleague saw a piano on the street near his house. I though about going to get it but we had a lot of heavy rain and it had been out there for days I worried about water damage and what kind of critters the might have gotten in there and made it their home (rats?).