I bought a piano today. Those who have been following this blog for a while will know that this is the second time I have done this, with the last being about nine years ago. Back then, I noted that the piano we bought was relatively cheap (about £250) and the seller noted that, since it was quite old, it wouldn’t necessarily last very long — but it would be fine for a few years.
Well, turns out he was correct; the piano was consistently going out of tune around the E-flat below middle C — interestingly, the exact same note my childhood piano consistently went out of tune on — and after a visit from a local tuner, it became clear that getting it fixed up was going to cost more than we paid for it in the first place.
I have been somewhat lax on my piano-playing for a while, and this is at least partly because when you have an instrument that isn’t quite right like this, it doesn’t incentivise you to want to play because you know you have to deal with the boingy out-of-tune notes. It’s weirdly “embarrassing”, even though it’s not the player’s fault.
But I had been feeling like I want to play some more again, and if I wanted to do that something had to be done about the poor old piano. The repair option didn’t seem worthwhile, so I started looking into replacements and/or a means of getting the old one responsibly removed — a piano isn’t the sort of thing you can just take to the tip (and not just because of its size) and the council won’t take it away as “bulky waste”, so you generally have to hire a specialist to get rid of it.
Thankfully, I found a good piano place about 40 miles from us in the form of Chamberlain Pianos. This is a company over in Haslemere, Surrey, not far from where I used to work as a teacher, and it seemed they offered part-exchange deals. So I enquired as to whether the old piano — which dates back to the 1920s — would be worth anything in part-exchange, and expressed an interest in a couple of the pianos they had on offer.
As it turns out, our old piano was not worth anything in part-exchange — which I was not surprised about, as it’s very old — but the company would be able to take it away when delivering a new one. So I made an appointment to go pay them a visit. And today was that appointment.
I was initially interested in an “Essex”-brand piano that had Steinway connections — I technically “have” a Steinway grand piano, but we don’t really have anywhere to put it right now, and I’m sure my parents are loathe to part with it anyway, which is perfectly fine as it has been a feature of their living room for a long time at this point. I gave it a go and it was… not bad, but not as mindblowing as I thought it might be.
Thankfully, the chap showing me around Chamberlain Pianos, sales director Dominic Barnett, knew his stuff about pianos and was keen to show me some other pianos around a similar price point that I might be interested in. These included a couple of Kemble-brand pianos that were about 10-15 years old (which are basically Yamahas without the badge and consequently half the price) and a brand new Kawai. I tried them all, and there was definitely a difference between them; I would have probably been happy with any of them, but the one I eventually plumped for was the Kemble “Conservatoire” model — so called because of its use in music schools, apparently — that had a winning combination of a nice action and a lovely tone.
So that should be with us next Friday, which is exciting! It’s shiny and black. I’ve always kind of wanted a shiny black piano ever since I played my secondary school’s shiny black Yamaha piano in Music Room 1. So I’m looking forward to putting that through its paces and hopefully making a bit more of a habit of playing and practicing again. I’m long overdue for doing that.
I am exceedingly grateful to my ever-generous parents for providing a contribution towards this new piano; it allowed us to plop down a deposit on a piano that is a bit nicer than we might otherwise have been able to afford by ourselves. So I guess I better make good use of it, huh?
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