Wow! I wish we had "swipe-card" access to get in to practice rooms! I have no idea who really comes in and does the damage I find on our instruments, but fortunately, nothing more than string breakage and finish blemishes, nothing has happened in my 3 years here. But....I'm probably due.... (knock on my head.....Ohh. I mean wood!) Or, our students and citizens of Lincoln are pretty nice, overall. The more I think about it....the more I'm not so inclined to go for keyboards....Perhaps....try just a few rooms with a contract with the local keyboard store and see what happens. If you just lose one or two keyboards, or the costs of their upkeep doesn't coorespond with the investement, then. there you go! Paul "Porritt, David" <dporritt at mail.smu.edu> Sent by: caut-bounces at ptg.org 04/06/2009 04:09 PM Please respond to caut at ptg.org To "caut at ptg.org" <caut at ptg.org> cc Subject Re: [CAUT] Inventory Thanks for your observations. Our practice room area is pretty well secured i.e. you have to swipe your ID card to get into the area. Since that has been installed our theft is down. Grand piano practice rooms are key locked in addition but the other rooms are open once you get into the practice area. The main thing that prevents is the access by non-music people getting in to beat on pianos. We have 17 Bs, 10 Ls and 9 Ms and 4 Ds. There are also a few Baldwins, a Mason & Hamlin etc. We have a fairly new piano lab with 12 (I think) student pianos plus the teacher’s piano & control but it’s new enough that recycling them to practice rooms might be a few years off. Their maintenance is not part of my job. This is all just in the “what if” stage and quite naturally may get plenty of opposition. I appreciate hearing all the real world experience people have with keyboards. dave David M. Porritt, RPT dporritt at smu.edu From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Paul T Williams Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 3:32 PM To: caut at ptg.org Subject: Re: [CAUT] Inventory Hi David, Never thought about keyboards for some "upright" practice rooms......something to consider. They would be much easier to "carry away", however. Our practice rooms are never locked...only the building at nights and during football games with only one monitor on weekends to keep an eye on things. maybe that's a bit too small-towned of an attitude. Our uprights by my observations don't really get played very much, but some sort of keyboard is absolutely necessary. How many B's do you have? We only have 3 in classrooms...2 being in the big orchestra room and chior room. The rest have either Baldwin R's or Steinway M's which work just fine. I suppose selling a bunch of uprights would easily trade out for nice weighted Yamaha keyboards of some kind. They will break, though. How is your electronic knowledge? They will also become obsolete rather quickly, so re-sale won't be a good economic option in the future. Will any music store consider a 2 year lease kind of thing with replacements on some sort of ongoing contract? We have a few keyboards here, but really only two ever get used in any sort of concert situation. Very handy for us several times like when the theatre folks need something in a crunch.. The keyboard skills and composition classrooms have lots of nice ones, but they're not movable and are locked when class is not in session. Just some food for thought. if you're going to sell any B's, please let me know. Maybe we can work something out, although this fiscal year is shot. Best, Paul "Porritt, David" <dporritt at mail.smu.edu> Sent by: caut-bounces at ptg.org 04/06/2009 03:07 PM Please respond to caut at ptg.org To "'caut at ptg.org'" <caut at ptg.org> cc Subject [CAUT] Inventory Colleagues: I am going to evaluate our inventory and compare what we have with what I think we should have. We don’t have any budget to make any big changes but I’m doing this to try to head us in the right direction. Without a plan nothing happens. One of the problems is that we have too many big pianos. We have more Steinway Bs than anything else and frankly they don’t fit very well in small classrooms. The other problem is the practice room uprights. Our orchestral program is important here so we have lots of string, brass and wind players practicing in these little rooms and until they are getting ready for a recital, they don’t need a piano. Our Associate Director and I had a conversation the other day about maybe using some electronic keyboards in some of these rooms. Have any of you any experience with having a few keyboards as part of your inventory? dave _________________________ David M. Porritt, RPT Meadows School of the Arts Southern Methodist University 6101 Bishop Dallas, TX 75275 dporritt at smu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090406/6bc54f77/attachment.html>
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