"Free piano"

It would be a very beautiful initiative. Unfortunately, finding a rehearsal room that has a good concert grand piano available is quite difficult, mainly because the costs for purchasing such a piano are quite prohibitive unless it's studios that do large productions and certainly don't go around renting out the room and the piano to everyone. This is because I think that while a concert pianist might come, an enthusiastic young kid who starts stomping on the keyboard might also come.

I suffered for years due to the lack of a decent piano to study on. Being an out-of-town student living kilometers away from home, I was renting an apartment with other university students and only had a first-generation Night & Day at my disposal. It was as crippling as one could imagine. In comparison, the new digital pianos are Ferraris. Every day I would beg for a room in the conservatory....and fortunately, I managed to get one!

Hundreds of times I have dreamed and desired the situation you describe, and I have always thought that if I ever had capital to invest, I would realize exactly what you are saying...a facility with pianos to be given out on "rent" for study, clearly in soundproofed rooms. An ideal situation with uprights and a few good grands...but perhaps economically it wouldn't be feasible or profitable.

Even if students were selected to avoid unreliable characters, the ratio between costs and revenues, in my opinion, would not make it feasible....unfortunately. All the more so considering the quality of digital pianos in circulation today.

The observation is interesting. It could be the Conservatories and public schools with a musical focus that offer this "corner". I have seen grand pianos for public use both in airports (including Rome-Fiumicino) and on the streets (in Frankfurt). Naturally, the sponsors are music stores which have every interest in advertising musical instruments. The thing works. Of course, the pianos in question are put to a hard test and it is not possible to stay for too long (for example, to study). However, I find it a good initiative. It should also be tried in piano stores. Some of them in Rome, at times, would allow, for a small fee, the possibility to study on a decent piano. Unfortunately, one must realize that it would be a service that needs to be kept under control (a person in charge who establishes shifts and monitors the "treatment" of the instrument more or less) and that requires continuous maintenance and inspection of the instruments. It is difficult, but sooner or later, someone will invent a "formula."

P.S. Naturally in the airport, and not only there, one hears nothing but Einaudi, perhaps performed poorly... but followed by a thunderous applause of consensus!

pianoexpert wrote:

The observation is interesting. It could be the Conservatories and public Schools with a musical focus that offer this "corner".

this is exactly the point to leverage: the service could be offered by someone who already owns a good piano for other purposes and make it become a source not simply of income but of greater income.

i did not dare think of public schools and conservatories because, as we know, in the public sector now that something is moving, one manages to die in time, and even when something moves, it's all a game of not taking responsibility for managing the matter.

this is why, in my opinion, the most suitable subject is private music schools.

As for the showroom shop, in the end, it would be more of a nuisance than anything else: it would be difficult to reserve an isolated space for the pianist user away from the shop customers, and managing an opening solely for this purpose outside of hours would be uneconomical (and I bet there would also be complications of a fiscal nature regarding the nature of the service offered).

A private school, on the other hand, I think has at least one or two people as reception staff etc. who - duly trained - could even check the condition of the instrument after each use.

i tried five years ago by asking the Municipality where I reside. In fact, a large building renovation project transformed the old Municipal headquarters into: spaces for the municipal library, study rooms for students, multi-purpose meeting spaces and... an auditorium with a Kawai grand piano that is always there.

Through the municipal protocol office, I wrote the proposal to the then councilor for culture... Never received a response.

But!! Very interesting, Luca. But did you know that years ago I suffered from the same thing? I had found the solution from a teacher who, after some deep reflection, told me that I could play her Steinway grand piano (naturally she knew I was studying and she would have been nearby too... to avoid precisely the "trampling" that Simone mentioned) for 5 or 6 hours, in short... we were still talking about lire and she asked for 100,000 lire per di... I never went, but I regret it a little.

Let's hope that sooner or later this little miracle happens at some institution... anyway, a good solution is to find a teacher who has the Steinway and perhaps get so good at playing that you make them overcome the fear of letting you play a piece on that marvel. Ha ha..

a discourse pertaining to ownership, I would say, and therefore to the cost-benefit balance. a question fueled by feelings of welcome or, conversely, of endurance. an interrogative also addressed on a management level, on certain occasions. a problem resolved or unresolved by the choices made by each individual, and above all by the indifference of many.

I read this discussion and the thing that immediately came to mind for me was "rehearsal room". Also because I imagine that someone might want to record a track and would like to use a grand piano. From a Google search, it seems that someone has already thought of this. We need to see what the costs are, obviously.