Pianotech

  • 1.  Digital piano longevity in practice rooms

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-08-2017 23:25
    A community college in my area has a number of Hamilton verticals- about 40+ years old.  These are often beat on by marginal "musicians".  As you would expect, they are now like old taxicabs, looking beat up and are noisy.  They actually have held up quite well considering the million miles of wear.
    There is discussion among the staff of replacing them with moderately priced digital pianos. They want my opinion.  Any of you have experience with digital vs. conventional pianos in heavily used practice rooms?

    Thanks!

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    Thomas Armstrong
    Salinas CA
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  • 2.  RE: Digital piano longevity in practice rooms

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-08-2017 23:52
    Thomas

    A digital piano will last about 10 years, max. Then, when anything breaks, the piano is useless because spare parts will no longer be available. On the other hand, you buy a P22, or something similar, and 10 years from now you will be able to repair anything that's broken, because the parts will still be available. Repeat 5 times.  A good digital will cost about 1/3 the price of a new P22, but you need to repeat that 5 times. 

    You do the math.

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    Willem "Wim" Blees, RPT
    Mililani, HI 96789
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Digital piano longevity in practice rooms

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-09-2017 00:49
    I service the pianos at a college that has a music lab with about 30 Clavinova's. They're about 10 years old and starting to break down. But the budget, as defined by the school district, only looks at the value of the current year. In spite of my objections they have decided to bring in a tech to repair the dying Clavinova's ONLY because it fits into this years budget. They don't want to know about long term investment. Yes, replacing them may cost more this year, but when you add up the repair costs over the next couple of years, and then when they are finally forced to replace them it will have cost them so much more. Deaf ears.

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    Geoff Sykes, RPT
    Los Angeles CA
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Digital piano longevity in practice rooms

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-09-2017 01:28
    Yes, digital pianos in "practice" rooms at a college are going to get a lot harder use than if they are used in a "piano class" room.  No, they don't need tuning every few months (if the acoustics get tuned that often) which is less expensive, but it depends on what the labor cost are when the digital's need service.  

    I have a Junior College here in St. Louis (Meramec Community College) that has a lab of about 20 Clavinovas, purchased around 10 years ago, and I have had only a couple of service calls on them over that time.  Prior to that, they had Musitronic/Wurlitzer Electronic piano for quite a few years, and then went to "Suzuk'si" because they were "cheap" and they only lasted a couple of years.


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    Ken Gerler, RPT

    Gerler Piano & Organ Service
    Florissant (St. Louis), MO 63033
    kenneth.gerler@prodigy.net
    314-355-2339
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Digital piano longevity in practice rooms

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-09-2017 10:30
    I totally agree with everyone's responses so far. 
     
    In my experience, (former electronic organ technician) parts are difficult to obtain after as little as three years and usually not available at all after 5 years.  Once the design engineers develop a replacement product, production is going to be put into motion to generate the latest and the greatest  .....  first on the sales floor, ahead of the competitors.  This puts the previous product out of production making parts availability a matter of what's left over or stock piled.  Once that pile is gone, it would take a massive amount of demand to get production to take currently made product off line for a short run of soon to be obsolete parts.  Comptrollers don't much care for the results of this sort of thing so the damage occurs out in the field when the customer is left hanging and the technician's hands are tied.  In the eyes of the corporate world, it's better that the customer of the past take the beating rather than the manufacturing process take a loss.
     
    If liquids get spilled on them, they're toast for the most part.
     
    The students like them better and they're more adaptable to sound systems, digital devices, and have a more modern feel and sound  ......  therefore they're far more popular with the students  ......  and increasingly so with the staff as the old school staff members are replaced.  Popular with the students equates to being a good teaching environment.
     
    Long term financial thinking isn't all that workable in an institution of extended learning .... as a general rule  ..........  unless the dollar amounts are much higher. 
     
    If it were me  ....  I'd have to think long and hard about if I'd want to put any work into changing the tide.  If I did put out the effort to convince the staff that the old ways are the best ways, I'd use Wim's comments as a guide and put together some mathematical graphics showing the two comparisons. 
     
    I'm seeing this very thing unfolding at a college I've been tuning the pianos for.  It's a slow death of the industry in our viewpoint.  As for the students and staff, it's "an adjustment" to comply with the times we live in.  I haven't been putting any effort into trying to convince this college to reconsider.  Instead, I've had to learn to enjoy my upcoming retirement and have taken steps to solidify those plans over the years.  I don't envy you younger technicians just starting out in this business.  The field is failing and has been since the mid-sixties. 
     
    Happy Holidays
     
    Lar
     



    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Digital piano longevity in practice rooms

    Member
    Posted 12-09-2017 11:27
    Looking down the road they would be better served doing a bulk buy of acoustic pianos that can be serviced by a qualified piano technician.
    Electronic instruments will be outdated in no time and parts will be extremely difficult to get let alone finding an electronic instrument tech who can service on-site. I am faced with the same problem here with the school district which has pianos that are 30/40/50 years old. The best thing to do is look at institutional grade acoustic pianos and evaluate them in person and after doing your homework. Too often the wrong people are involved in the process of selection. Instead of spending 7-8 k on one good quality institutional studio some genius purchased 2 junk consoles 
    for 3k each and "saved" 2k . The benches where so cheap they fell apart the first year. 

     One of the high schools had a keyboard lab and half to 2/3rd of the keyboards where broken. A grant from the local arts festival helped with purchasing replacement keyboards. The college needs to decide what the purpose of the practice rooms are- is it to teach piano or keyboarding ?  Perhaps some type of replacement plan can be scoped out so a dozen pianos a year can be purchased.

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    James Kelly
    Pawleys Island SC
    843-325-4357
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    Original Message


  • 7.  RE: Digital piano longevity in practice rooms

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-09-2017 11:44
    What are technicians doing with old Disklaviers? They have been on the market for at least 25 years, I think, and the early ones have to be nearly unusable even though the acoustic part of the instrument is still working great. Can Disklaviers be updated through Yamaha? Maybe PianoDisc has an adaptable system to replace old Yamaha player mechanisms. Maybe the only reasonable option is to forget about the electronics and just use the piano as a straight up acoustic instrument and replace the old hybrids with new hybrid models. 

    Are we coming around to the olden days of pneumatic players that got old and difficult to maintain? Many of those old player mechanisms were ripped out of pianos back in the 1940s or earlier. I grew up with a piano like that, a Vose and Sons that worked great as a regular piano even though it had been stripped of its player system.

    Richard West

     




    Original Message


  • 8.  RE: Digital piano longevity in practice rooms

    Posted 12-09-2017 17:35
    So here at BU Music School the  group piano lab. has 15 Clavinova's all doing fine with an annual service/maintenace contract . We phased the original Clavinovas  out to the Tanglewood  BU Summer program where they are  housed . Of the 190 or so  acoustic pianos on inventory at Music School we  also have 11 Yamaha NU1 digital pianos which are just a few years old and I've noticed this year are getting much more active daily use not by piano performance majors but other instrument or voice majors  who have piano/keyboard skills. They're flexible in pitch choices  and also have a very acceptable 'harpsichord' mode. We're phasing out  the 40 year old Hamiltons and older  Sohmer uprights with P22 acoustic models and a few of the digital NU1models, I don't think we'll purchase more  digitals, not because of quality issues but we wanted to have a small number for students to have choices,  future purchases of pianos in this segment of the inventory will be the P22 models, fyi  the institutional price I get  for an NU1 and a P22 are pretty close, P22 just $400 more.

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    Martin Snow
    Boston MA
    617-543-1030
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    Original Message