Anne Francis

OK, the photo is extreme. But stay with me for a minute.

When trolling Kijiji for good used pianos for a customer, as I occasionally do, I often see something like this: “Beautiful antique piano in great shape, just needs tuning. Only $500.”

Sometimes I get calls from people who have just bought one of these pianos, and now they need someone to come and tune it.

So they paid $500 for that piano, and maybe $300 to have it moved… And then, for another $100 or so (they figure), they can get it tuned, and they’ll be set. Total outlay: under $1000. Seems reasonable, right?

Wrong. It often doesn’t work out that way.

The piano they bought may not look like the one above. But a piano action contains hundreds of moving parts, which, after 80 or 100 years (or even less, in the case of a lesser-quality piano) just don’t work very well.

A piano that is very old AND sounds badly out of tune is almost guaranteed to have multiple age-related problems that are expensive to repair. If the pitch has dropped a semitone or more, you’re looking at several tunings to get it back up to pitch and stable, and depending on the condition of the strings, broken strings are a distinct possibility, which means further repairs. (And that’s assuming the tuning pins are tight enough to hold the increased string tension.)

These repairs often add up to much more than the piano is worth. And sometimes the piano can’t be brought back to life.

So do yourself a favour. Hire the piano technician BEFORE you take that old beater you found online; don’t wait til after you’ve moved it in.