11/ Here’s an MP3 of a couple of tunes played on the piano I got earlier today, a George Steck baby grand, before a tuning. It’s close to in tune already.
10/ Particularly if you want a spinet style piano, there are gazillions of good ones for $1K or much less, that at most just need cleaning and tuning and other work that wouldn’t run you more than $500. Do avoid the scams!
9/ The music store owner I got my piano from said movers often must dump pianos people just want to get rid of. Many end in landfills. Some belong there, but some just need expert TLC, like the upright I tried.
8/ The economics of pianos is interesting. The most gorgeous new, high-quality instruments cost 10s of 1000s of $. But there are many more pianos out there than there are active players. You’d be shocked at what you can get free and cheap.
7/ So I looked in Facebook Marketplace and here were a bunch more candidates. My wife told me to spend a little money. I learned that for under $2000 you can get a beautiful baby grand without significant issues.
6/ So I went back to the upright. This time I had studied how to inspect pianos and had a checklist. I took notes and videos. It had some problems. Could be fine just after being cleaned and tuned, piano tuners said. Or not. So…we passed.
5/ The new baby grands were already out of state, both of them. But I could contact the mover and have it brought back! The mover wrote, sure we’ll bring it back. Just remit $210 up front. I had stumbled onto a Craigslist scam (of course).
4/ I visited the upright. It was a bit out of tune and I was more excited about others…especially baby grands that looked new. For free? Both had been used by someone (a son and a wife) who’d just died. And the pianos had just moved…hm…
3/ So I texted and wrote to a number of sellers of free pianos, just to check them out. (Both my boys are learning on our electric piano.) One was a free nice upright piano that looked like one I learned on as a kid.
2/ Something made me think to look online for cheap pianos, last Thursday. There were, I was not surprised to see, a number of cheap but bad pianos on Craigslist. But I also saw a number of free pianos that looked OK—some very good.
1/ I bought a baby grand piano over the weekend for $650. This is kind of an interesting story. First, here’s the piano. Was played on daily in a music school for 7 years. Tuned yearly, looks good and sounds well. Built around 1980.
This of course is why the GameStop thing is such a big story.
New poll. Especially for “people of the book” (the Bible).
Question: Does it impress you that you are commanded to love all people? Click to vote >
What was life for repressed Christians under totalitarian socialism in Eastern Europe? The answer is soberingly relevant to society today.
Alisa Childers interviews Rod Dreher (@roddreher on Twitter). The topic, Dreher’s book on this stuff. Video >
On Twitter, I’m down 5.3K followers from a high of 39.3K. That’s 13.5%. Twitter is also much less interesting now. I don’t post as much, and I’m increasingly committed to sangerfeed.org, my microblog that just happens to push to Twitter.