Minichan

bitches ❤️?❤️ baby grands

Alkan or Godowsky?

@previous (C)
that's the funny part, i have no clue. a quick google search turns up composers and virtuoso pianists so i assume you're asking something about technique and who's method is superior in my opinion? maybe one day i'd be able to answer that, but atm i'm not sure what you're asking exactly. who composed more beautiful music?

just saying.hard to get rid of pianos or organs these days because bands just buy a small electronic board which suffices..
of course beautiful high end pieces like yours are still valued for being collectable..

@768,644 (squeegee)
I was asking which composer's music you prefer. Both are neglected pianist-composers of the 19th century. Alkan is (in my opinion) the greatest piano genius other than Beethoven and Schubert. Check out his monumental 'Concerto for Solo Piano' and his equally insane 'Symphony for Solo Piano', both from his Opus 39.

For Godowsky, check out his studies on Chopin's Etudes. Here's Hamelin playing the first etude (at the Grammys, of all things!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lgYoKK2gzk

@768,645 (E)
that's what i've been told. just today i mean. i was told not to buy as an investment, i don't really buy antiques anyway, i bought it because it's gorgeous and they were practically giving it away. i paid 1k for it, it's appraised at over 40k and they had it priced through an estate sale at 10k. i caught wind of it by accident, and the story behind it is pretty crazy all around actually.

my brother is buddies with a pro football player and dude loves to go antiquing. he hits up every high end estate sale in dallas and buys crazy nice stuff apparently. he just loves that shit. house full of it. so he bought a huge old hand carved... credenza thing, idk wtf it was but it was pretty big and looked expensive but he kept saying he paid, like, nothing for it and had a huge shit eating grin over the whole thing. anyway, he needed a big van, which my business has several of and so of course when my brother called asking to let this dallas cowboy borrrow it i was like, fuck yeah, but i'm going and driving. lol.

so we get out there, way the fuck up north of dallas. this place was literally an estate. multiple buildings, a garage with a freaking elevator in it and a parking garage. there was a 1960's prototype Ferrari in there that raced at le mans. 1 of a kind. hand made. worth hundreds of thousands... but we'll get to that.

you ever hear the joke about the guy who shows up to buy a Ferrari and the jilted wife sells it for a dollar just to get back at her cheating husband? well... so here's the thing, texas does have at fault divorces in the event of adultery and that can lead to seriously unbalanced settlements in favor of the spouse, and this woman caught her husband sneaking off with strippers (re:hookers) to the caman islands and spending a secret 15k a month at a gentleman's club in plano. lol. she caught him on vacation with hookers and even got their fucking names off the plane tickets he bought them with his secret credit card. she found their facebook pages... with pictures of her husband with them in the tropics. she showed us the pictures. he looked... tired.

so, back to today. we go in to get this credenza thing he bought, and this absolutely gorgeous little baby grand is sitting there. everyone was drooling over it, and i heard the price was 2k, down from 10. i was fucking shocked. i checked all the keys, it needs to be tuned and apparently the piano guy said they keyboard needed some kind of repair, but other than that it's in outstanding condition *afaik. so, like, mostly we were dealing with the home owners friend, and i asked about it, i was like, "you're asking 2 thousand for this?" and she then told me it had actually just sold for that price. i said, "oh, okay, for 2 thousand i was interested," and we laughed about how great a price it seemed to be. a while later the home owner came in and she mentioned that the guy backed out of the sale and she was stuck with it, and would probably just donate it to the SMU music department who'd offered to take it for free.

so everyone looked at me and the friend said i was interested at the 2k and the home owner looked at me and said "you can have it for a thousand."

i didn't even fucking think about it, i just said i'd bring her the money after we finished unloading this other thing. pretty sure she didn't want to be stuck with any kind of physical property. she wanted to ding his for as much as she could against his liquid assets. if the court ruled she gets 80% of his net worth, then she wants to fuck him in the pocket book as much as anything else. sell off all his assets, then take 80% of his money. (or whatever she gets.) i.e. she sold an antique italian credena thing worth 20k for $700 bucks and a grand piano for a thousand bucks + a star bucks coffee. (i'm bringing starbucks with the balance over in the morning)

now back to that ferarri. like i said, hand made prototype raced in le mans, a historied and valuable vintage race car. they had just spent $49,000 having the engine rebuilt. it's pretty much priceless, but in actual selling terms it's valued in the several hundred thousand range. sold for $40k to the first person who offered anything for it.

we all left with a shit eating grin.

*i know nothing about pianos in any practical sense

@768,646 (C)
Nice dadrockpost

oh yeah, and her husband raced cars in the 80s until he got in a wreck racing in some other kind of nascar type race and almost lost his foot. after that he made it rich in oil and gas. oh, and we even got to see pictures of the floozies he was running around with. she was happy to show us pics, they looked about like you'd expect. they appeared to be 9/10ths plastic. the one he married was the trashier one too. probably in her late 20s. he's 67. just wow. the whole thing.

what a fun fucking day.

@768,671 (squeegee)
very interesting..

and yes..the few who really know their way on the keys can enable a similar shiver down our backs or a quiver in our chin much similar to the rush of a thrill ride on an epic sportsmobile...true..

@768,646 (C)
i don't know! but i might develop an opinion now that i have a piano! i don't really know much about piano, tbh. like classical music i probably know more than i think i know - i just can't name anything or know who composed what, so i'll have to listen to some of their work and see if i pick out anything i recognize.

i'm more of a wood wind guy. i played saxophone (alto and tenor) and bassoon in school and picked up concert flute after that. i learned a little guitar to impress the ladies in college, cause let's face it, flute isn't exactly a panty dropper, you know what i'm saying? but i kinda suck at it and i never practiced anything worth while so like i learned a couple of dozen chords and left it at that. most popular music can be played with like 6. so.

piano will be a new experience. growing up it was always "dads" instrument. you know? yeah, i don't wanna play dad's instrument.

so yeah. i guess i'll have to start listening to a lot of piano so i'll know the melodies i'll be wanting to play. i'm actually excited. i know for fact there's a lot i'll want to play, i just don't know what the songs are named right now... exploration and discovery is fun business.

but yeah, i mean i'll be starting with mary had a little lamb and shit. again... oh, but i know there are some bach pieces i'll want to work towards. i know it's cliche, but his partita no.3 in e major is fucking gorgeous on any instrument, i've heard it transcribed for a clavicord and it might be one of my favorite things, i kinda can't wait to even play passages from it on a period piano. i'm fucking stoked.

i've wanted to get a single key baroque style wooden flute for years because historically informed performance on period instruments is the fucking shit. but i guess i'm learning piano first.

i'm about to watch that video you linked. how do you feel about chopin? over rated? i like learning about more obscure composers. i dunno how obscure maurice ravel is but i've been trying to get into his stuff. and rachmaninoff. i don't think he's obscure, but the DSO was doing his first symphony i think and i wanted to want to go, but i listened to it and i wasn't impressed, but i probably should have gone because i think i caught the tail end of it this last weekend in the live broadcast and it was amazing whatever it was.

vivaldi in april though. i already got tickets. thinking about going to prokofiev too.

so recommend me some more piano composers. and do you play? i can sight read but i've never dealt with the, uh, f clef.

@previous (squeegee)
lubomyr melnyk is a cool composer and pianist who is alive. you should play the flute for us squeegee

(Edited 14 seconds later.)

@OP
Can you play dadrock on it?

@768,715 (hot dotty)
okay, it's too late atm and i'm clearing out a spot for the piano right now but i'll try and set something up. the only recording equipment i have is my computer headset mic. i do have an experimental instrument made from clock parts i can play to see if the headset works well enough. let's see...

@768,730 (Big Daddy Derek !Uvm54ORbmo)
probably, but it'll probably sound best playing greatgrandadrock which is far superior

@768,677 (squeegee)
wow the guy sounds like a real trumper

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0CntqCQn6NB

uh, right, so this is what i'm calling the "manualmatic percussive chimeiano" no.1 which is made from clock parts, the chime rods and parts from the striking mechanics. mostly it's hammers, pivot rods and a heavy iron block the chime rods screw into. it sounds like shit.

the tuning is super interesting, actually. i'm still trying to figure out exactly why it's tuned the way it is, but i think it's in a very flat e major. these parts were made to play 3 tunes, 2 of which are keyed in e major and the other is in f major and the tunes all start by playing a scale, so the only way for the e major tunes to sound correct would be to flatten out the entire scale so it could pick up the one shared b flat between the three tunes. i think that leaves one of the three tunes sounding sharp so they sharpened everything on that tune just a bit and kinda split the difference and left some notes sounding flat, some sounding sharp but each tune remains sounding in tune with itself even if the over all melody is a smidge off. i was able to check the tuning on the sets of chimes and they're all very close to the same, so it doesn't seem to be an issue of bad manufacturing. i think it's purposeful. but idk, i'm no musician.

i have a couple more of these i made at work that i rekeyed to C and scale across 2 octaves which is pretty cool. i'll eventually add this one to those and have a low register but i need longer rods. and if i cut them any shorter they sound weak as fuck. also all it really plays is a c major scale so i didn't include any accidentals. yet.

it's super simple and works like a clavichord kinda but it's easy to be too heavy with the fingerings and badly dampen the chime so it's super touchy. i made a more complex mechanism that uses 2 hammers and allows for bounce back but it's really noisy articulation, it works but sounds like shit and is very hard to adjust for proper striking since there's multiple hammers.

i was getting ready to work on a simpler mechanism and deviate from the "only clock parts" design requirement i set on myself and make some parts from square dowel rod but i have a real piano to fuck with now.

anyway, this mic is kinda shit for recording. i'll still record something on the flute later though

http://vocaroo.com/i/s03z8fnRufrA

yeah, so this is what heavy fingers do. you kinda gotta just tap the key and let go quick otherwise it just goes "thunk"

http://vocaroo.com/i/s1hNhf5lLsA4

chords sound kinda okay.

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0A34bTHnpvA

i tried, i can't make the mic record much better than this. lotsa background and little clarity. it's not the easiest thing to play, it's kinda small cause the parts so there's not much room for more than 2 fingers on each hand. and it needs dampers cause it rings like a bell

(Edited 2 minutes later.)

i may have bought a grand piano, not a baby grand. the piano company is making a distinction, calling it not a baby grand. i'll ask more questions when they get here, it may just be that early grand pianos were smaller than todays standard size? cause it is little. 6 foot little though.

on it's way though. delivery is 600 bucks now. i guess they consider it $50 more difficult to move than their original quote.

oh yeah, i already got an offer on it. i sent pics to my mom who showed her dentist and he's offering 3 grand if i want to dump it, but that i should look at appraisal and auction. he's an actual pianist and has a collection of pianos and says it's actually quite rare and reiterated the likelyhood it was played by a literal famous composer. evidently the story that goes along with the antique is that schrimpf was a small artisan piano maker in vienna who made high quality pianos in and around a small cloister of famed piano makers in this artisan community. it was common for pianos like these to be bought for concert halls, and it's condition suggest very good care. so it's claimed to be a concert piano likely performed on by famous pianists. of course there are no documents coming with it, so the history is speculative (makes a fun story though) but not at all far fetched. it's the right age, quality and came from the right region.

not sure exactly what i bought, but i now have 3 life long piano players telling me it's a steal for what i payed and they wouldn't have flinched either.

(Edited 1 minute later.)

glad i didn't try moving it myself. took 5 guys, a box truck and over an hour. got a look at the keyboard action. felt is all pretty bad and it makes about a half a dozen keys stick. when i get it tuned they'll refurb it. all the strings look okay, not a bit of rust anywhere.

keys are in fact ivory. i thought they were maybe simulated, but no. the piano guy actually pointed them out and asked if i knew what they were. they don't really add afuck load of value, but the caps alone are about $500 if i just sold those. just kinda cool. if i lived in new york apparently it would have been an illegal sale.

decided to not wait for a piano tuner to look at it and i went ahead and checked out the action myself. so, i did happen to find a broken hammer. it's a result of the move. the movers were even cautioning each other - repeatedly - to not do the thing that would break a hammer. i also have a picture of the full action which has the non-broken key in frame. it's the c4 key, which is a damn shame. not much to do about it but call the movers and see if they'll make right by it. probably not.

the action does need a bit of work, i fixed several of the sticky keys, they were just catching the dampers wrong and needed a bit of tweaking. actually a lot of them need adjustment. one hammer appears to be hitting the harp and getting caught. not sure what the fix is for that, possibly the keyboard is just not properly centered and the one hammer is off just enough to catch. so really it's just got 2 keys with big problems. the others are all working but some of the hammers aren't checking properly which is either a spring tension issue or the back check is out of alignment.

most of they keys have decent articulation, but some of them feel heavy which is an indicator things need to be oiled or felt needs replacing or refurb. it's pretty severely out of tune on 6 keys, the rest are... close enough but everything needs tuning. i want to pull the action, but there's a trick to installing it the movers were struggling with, so i'll wait for help before attempting that. i could probably fix that hammer myself if i could get to it. probably it needs a replacement shank. but if i'm going to actually have the action refurbed by professionals then i'll let them take care of the hammer obviously.

i do have a friend that happens to collect and refurb antique player pianos and old pump organs and he's going to come look at it in a couple of weeks. might be able to get him to teach me what he's doing. it's kinda interesting, certainly a neat little mechanism. evidently there's a whole range of refurbishing you can do to the felt, leather and wood that doesn't require replacing parts. i've never sanded leather or felt before, but that's how it works i guess. still its something i probably shouldn't do myself even if i wanted to. plus it would probably take me months doing it 85 times and i'd probably just fuck it up.

really the biggest issue are the two dead keys and the tuning. i'm sure a piano repairman will tell me there's more problems than that though.

oh, and the soundboard does have cracks in it. lol. not like i'm worried about playing in concerts or something, but yeah, that's like a 10k repair. i could spend thousands on the case just having it shimmed rather than replaced, but i'm not about to worry about actually restoring the thing to concert hall ready. i'll be happy with working keys, proper hammer checks, and reasonably tuned.

the exterior has a few issues, but tbh they're not all that bad. the finish is like 90% good. there's some light chipping in some concealed areas which isn't as bad as i thought originally. the finish is thick as fuck too. like 2mm easy. i don't know that it's ever been refinished, it looks pretty original to me. layer after layer after fucking layer of thick lacquer. there's like no sign on the underside that anything had been done other than the original varnishing. everything was neat and tidy and clean with no trace of old varnish being chemically removed. if it was ever stripped, sanded and refinished they took a lot of care to not show any sign of it on the unfinished side.

the brass inlay is in good shape too. along the bottom edge there's a bit of brass pulling away from it's grove, but it's stable for now. not unusual from what i hear for brass inlay to do that, but no reason to attempt an unnecessary repair that could cause a problem during an actual restoration. so like if i sell it, people will be like, "why the fuck did you glue that fucking thing in there." i guess if i could get it flush then i could inject an adhesive in there and really just stabilize it but i don't want to run the risk of fucking up the finish. aside from a few hairline cracks in the gloss (which isn't unusual for really really old lacquer finishes i'm told) i'm surprised at how stable and good looking it is. if there's any veneer on it at all it's still bonded tight as a drum.

anyway. that's pretty much it. i'll let y'all know which way it goes, either fix it or sell it or other.

(Edited 1 minute later.)

@previous (squeegee)
Make this thread again!