[pianotech] NY Times article on pianos

[David Love]

Well, I repin actions and even rebush keys without doing a total rebuild.
Gosh, the other day I even filed a set of hammers without replacing them! 

 

Gee, had I known this is where it would all lead maybe I'd have thought
twice about posting it.  Things like this are inevitable.  The state of the
art rancher that I grew up in got bulldozed a few years back when it sold
basically for the land (too bad we moved too soon!).   Economies of scale
will always produce at lesser cost than individuals.  History is replete
with examples of manufacturing moving around.  I don't hear anybody
complaining about that cheap computer they are typing away on.  Maybe you'd
rather have an old IBM dos computer from 1980 made in the good ol' USA.  I
think they cost about $6000 back then, had a very small fraction of the
capacity and speed.  What would those computers cost with the rate of
inflation now?    

 

There will always be a market for custom rebuilds of quality pianos.  I
haven't had a down day even during this last recession (knock on wood).  But
unless you are willing to sell your services for minimum wage you just can't
compete (nor should you) with modern manufacturing in terms of production
costs versus rebuilding pianos of negligible value.  I don't think it's any
great conspiracy.  

 

I'm not sure that the young generation is not interested in becoming piano
tuners any less than our generation when I/we were younger.  It's always
been a somewhat specialized market.  When I want a plumber, electrician,
cabinet maker, carpenter. I have plenty to choose from and they all seem to
charge a living wage.  I have a hard time seeing the connection between the
future of our trade and the global oil market or "big Pharma".  

 

Anyway, I saw this very nice small Young Chang grand piano in Seattle.  Lots
of custom design features, quality parts, well made (from what I could
tell).  Under 5' and sounded very nice and hadn't benefitted yet from any
preparation.  I don't know what the MSRP was but I'll bet it was quite
reasonable.  So try and talk your average Ms Johnson  who wants her 6
year-old to start taking piano lessons into rebuilding her Apollo Grand
which is coming apart even at Midwestern prices, and then show her what she
could have for a fraction of that cost and see what she says.   Or maybe you
could just repin the action, rebush the keys, rub on a little Howard's
Finish Restore and call it a day.  She won't know-or will she?

 

David Love

www.davidlovepianos.com

 

From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of Susan Kline
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2012 2:29 PM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [pianotech] NY Times article on pianos

 

What I see is one more way in which this country has paid for letting 
Wall Street put most of the young and educated into indentured servitude 
via student loans. The young generation cannot afford to become ordinary 
everyday piano tuners, so the work is going undone. Even if people wanted 
to get standard piano maintenance, they could hardly find anyone to do it 
for an affordable sum. 

So here we have a population fighting unemployment with scant success, but 
at the same time it's nearly impossible to find people like repairmen, 
affordable plumbers, doctors who will take the time to practice medicine 
instead of pushing drugs for Big Pharma, or anyone who will do jobs like 
repinning an action or even rebushing keys, without doing a total 
rebuild and charging "California prices." (Sorry, David, I know that's 
just how it is, living there.) 

It's the same thing which affects all manufactured goods. Anything solid 
and long-lasting stopped being made because the people owning production 
could skim more by using sweat labor and turning out non-durable imports, 
which purposefully cannot be repaired. 

If people will step back and take a longer view, they might notice that 
Peak Oil and Global Warming are neither of them myths, and the party is 
nearly over. Check the price of corn this week. The national credit card 
has been maxed out for years, and only the desire to postpone collapse has 
caused the Chinese to grant us loans we can never repay, to buy more of 
their stuff which they should keep for themselves. 

The political cartoons this week are talking about driving toward 
"fiscal collapse". Does anyone think that people will go on buying cheap 
keyboards and imported grands after the Euro zone implodes (now in 
progress) and food stocks worldwide go from thin to empty from 
repeated droughts? 

The ability to repair things has not been the flavor of the month (or 
the year or several decades) but I think its time will come again. 
In the meantime, we should triage the pianos before they head to the 
dump, try to find homes for the better abandoned ones, make playable the 
medium-tired but good, and sadly let the rest go. Anything which we can 
do to slow down the trashing of pianos, some perfectly good, we should 
do. I doubt that in twenty years building cheap grands in Indonesia and 
shipping them here and to Europe will still be a viable business. And 
maybe by then we'll start making and doing things for ourselves again.

Susan Kline



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