Post by @inthehands@hachyderm.io

2026-10-24 23:45 UTC

You should budget a couple hundred dollars / year for tuning & maintenance. Acoustic pianos, even mediocre ones, have a life and a joy in them that even very high-end electric keyboards cannot match. You’re much more likely to be drawn to play an acoustic! And no, “but it has weighted keys!” does not change this equation. It’s more than key weight; it’s about the incredible organic complexity of the internals of these instruments. An electric can •sound• a lot better than all but the fanciest and best-maintained acoustics, but the acoustics will so often still •feel• better. And feel beats sound. BUT… Getting an acoustic piano is more like adopting a pet than buying an appliance, so set expectations accordingly! /end #piano

Replies (5)

@inthehands@hachyderm.io 2026-10-24 23:53

And… If all that is daunting, there’s no shame in getting an electric keyboard instead! They don’t need tuning, humidity swings won’t ruin them, they need less space, you can move them without hiring specialized mover, you can use them for electronic music production, and you can make them sound like a marimba or whatever! They’re a great choice for trying it out a little but you aren’t sure if it’s going to stick, or if you’re getting a kid started, or if your apartment is tiny, or etc etc. Just do note what I said upthread about the mysterious attraction of the acoustic instrument. There are alternatives, but there are no substitutes. /end #piano

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@screwlisp@gamerplus.org 2026-10-24 23:49

@inthehands@hachyderm.io did you ever hire a piano mover and had them show up without any suitable means of moving a piano, clearly having never been in the same room as a piano before let alone moved one, it is just some thing they wrote in a newspaper classified? It does happen n=1

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@Nigel_Lake@mastodon.world 2026-10-24 23:49

@inthehands@hachyderm.io In an ideal world, I'd have both - and even better a grand in the living room, an upright in the kitchen and a Nord in the music room 😀

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@perkinsy@aus.social 2026-10-24 23:51

@inthehands@hachyderm.io I sooo agree with all your advice. We had a piano for years and moved a ridiculous number of times. We ALWAYS hired a piano removalist and we ALWAYS had it regularly tubed and serviced. We reluctantly sold our piano before an international move and we were expecting to live in a high rise apartment. We bought an electric keyboard with weighted keys etc. It is most definitely not the same as a real piano. I frequently sat at our real piano and played. I rarely do this with our keyboard. I have never worked out what it was, but I have no emotional connection to it, and to me, playing music is about expressing heartfelt things.

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@theorangetheme@en.osm.town 2026-10-24 23:54

@inthehands@hachyderm.io A friend gave me his grandmother's old practice piano. "If you can move it, you can have it." I paid to move it ($100 across town, pre-crazy inflation times), then had it tuned. I figured it was tuned and inspected yearly, but was informed it hadn't been tuned in 15 years! Despite this, my friend recommended a good piano tuner who said we could go up slowly back to 440 Hz, but I didn't mind as long as it was in tune with itself.

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