Why I still don’t own an acoustic piano, Part Two

A couple of weeks back, I was reading the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal and they had an article about a woman’s quest to buy a piano. She sounded to be cast much in the same mold as me: not particularly talented, not particularly rich, but sure of her dedication to playing and with a devotion to jazz. Without belaboring the fine points of the article, it ended up that she ran across a second hand Baldwin grand that she and her jazz-oriented instructor liked the sound of, and so she ended up with (I believe) a Baldwin concert grand in her house.

This entry would be too boring without a picture of a piano, so, why not a nice Yamaha?!

Up until reading that article, I’d never considered a Baldwin, much like I’d never considered a Steinway until I ran across a cheap one on Craigslist (this in spite of the fact that the Wall Street Journal had another piece about a woman buying a Steinway a few years back. Now that I think about it, why is it always a woman?) But, if somebody could write a newspaper article about that experience, I felt I owed it to myself to at least consider the piano that was the subject matter.

Since reading that article, I've broadened my search to include Steinways and Baldwins, still without success. You would think with so many pianos to choose from, it would be a simple matter to find one I liked at a good price. I think my point is: buying a piano is pretty much like buying a car. There are sports cars and roadsters and sedans and old ones that work and old ones that need work, and European made and Asian made and USA made, and they call come in different colors with different features, and in the second hand market, some owners have nice ones they just want to get rid of, and some have junk that they just want moved, and some have nice ones they’ll only sell for the right price, and some have middling ones that they are attached to and they end up being overpriced, and some just don’t know what a fair price is and so they are priced wrong from start to finish, and some are worth buying and considering and some are not, and some should be pursued and some should be positively avoided.

And all that availability and information and misinformation and static and noise is why I still don’t own an acoustic piano. (End part two)