Piano Video Lesson: What Happens to Old Pianos?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin with a very important subject, what happens to old pianos? I'm going to tell you right now, right from the get go, that what I'm going to show you today is very disturbing for those of you who love piano like I do, seeing what I'm going to show you is really heart wrenching.

But first I'm going to talk about what happens to old pianos. Now there are some like Living Pianos who restore old pianos and we do that and not just with Steinway's. Most companies that restore pianos specialize in Steinway and maybe a couple of other brands because you Steinway's command more money than other brands because everybody sees them on the concert stage and they know they're high quality pianos. But most people don't know of other high quality piano brands that were around in the United States when there were hundreds, perhaps over a thousand piano companies making pianos and many of them were great instruments. The problem is restoring a piano is extremely expensive.

Many top restorers get between $30 ,000 to $40 ,000 to completely rebuild a piano to make it like new again.

As a matter of fact, I had a personal tour in Steinway, the CEO and all the people treated me like royalty there and they gave me a grand tour of the entire facility and when we passed their rebuilding shop, they said it's a lot easier to build pianos than to rebuild them and boy do we know that.

And pianos that have never had any work done to them are actually easier to rebuild than pianos that somebody has done some work along the way because you don't know the specifications of the matching parts. But anyway, there are resources for old pianos such as PianoAdoption .com, a great place to go. If you have a piano you just want to be able to get rid of and you don't have the heart to see it go to the dump which is really what this video is about and the images you are seeing, this is something that happens on a regular basis all around the country. It is just heart wrenching to see what happens when pianos need more work than what they're worth.

You know I have a friend who has a piano business and he revealed to me that this past year, believe it or not, he took 170 pianos of his that he had in storage and just had to trash them because there was no way he was going to get to them and be able to restore them. And you know that you actually have to pay money when you have an old piano that you can't get rid of. You think somebody would want it. Sometimes you have a piano that looks gorgeous. You think somebody would want it just for the furniture.

Now there are some pianos that can be restored, thank goodness. But you know for every piano we take in to restore sadly we have to turn down dozens that just aren't worth it because the fundamental structure has to be intact. There is only so much you can do to bring life to older pianos. Some are excellent candidates and you get stellar results. Others you just can't get the kind of results anymore and they sadly end up in the landfill.

Sorry to bring you down with this but the good news is that we and other businesses do restore pianos so that we do have these treasures from when the United States was the epicenter of the piano industry.

Unlike today when maybe two and a half thousand pianos, maybe a little bit more, are built in North America.

So that's the long and short of it. I hope that this hasn't been too wrenching to watch but I thought it was important information for you. Again I'm Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. It's our mission to spread the joy of piano and to restore instruments that are worthy of it and to have everybody enjoy the piano in one way or another. And I hope you're on the same page. If you are consider subscribing. Thanks again. I'm Robert Estrin. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/what-happens-to-old-pianos/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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