Moving can be a very stressful time in a person’s life, especially if he or she has not hired appropriate help to move their furniture. Piano moves can be especially stressful, because the mover needs to have special knowledge and skills to safely move the piano. In this article I have outline a few frequently asked questions about piano moving in order to help understand what is involved in moving a piano and prepare you with the information to choose the right mover. At the end of the article, I have listed some questions that you can ask to help you choose your piano mover, as well as the information that you should have ready in order for the mover to be sufficiently prepared for your move.
Why do I need to hire a professional piano mover?
Many of you may be wondering why you would need to hire a professional piano moving company to move your piano, rather than using the household mover who is moving the rest of the contents of your house. The main reason for hiring a professional piano mover is that many household movers do not have adequate training or equipment to properly move a piano.
The average upright piano weighs between 400 and 900 pounds. Grand pianos can weigh between 650 and 1300 pounds. The value of a piano can vary from a few hundred dollars to 500,000 dollars depending on the make, model, age and condition of the piano. The majority of piano moves involve moving the instrument through a tight space such as a small door frame or staircase. In some cases, the piano may need to be dismantled in order to get it out of your house. Using and experienced professional piano mover will drastically minimize the risk of damage to the instrument and to your home.
As a piano mover, I have come across many cases where a customer has hired a household piano mover to move their piano and has had to make an emergency call to us because the household mover could not get the piano out of his or her house. In other cases, I have received calls from customers who had hired a non-reliable piano mover because their price was much lower, and had to book an emergency move with us, because that piano mover did not show up to move their piano or call to explain why they were not there.
How are pianos moved?
When you hire a professional piano mover, you can expect 2-3 people to come to your home equipped with piano skids, moving pads, ramps, slings, and the knowledge of how to move your piano safely. They will use special techniques to maneuver the piano out of your house. When the piano is put on the truck, it will be safely secured to the vehicle in order to avoid damage during transport. In the most difficult moves, 4-6 people may be used. Generally when a piano is moved by someone other than a professional piano mover, this equipment, knowledge and these safety precautions are not employed. While hiring a professional piano mover does not completely eliminate the risk of damage, it will drastically reduce this risk. Furthermore, a good piano mover will assess the situation and inform you if there is a chance of damage before he or she begins the move, and will give you the option of proceeding or not.
Are all professional piano movers equal?
Unfortunately, as in any trade, each piano moving company varies in their level of quality and experience. Some piano movers are better equipped and more prepared than others and act with more care and integrity than others. The best way to find a good piano mover is to call around to your local piano stores, piano technicians and piano teachers to find out which company they use. Piano stores in particular have a high stake in ensuring that they use reliable, high quality piano movers who have the least risk of damaging their instruments and are properly insured in the event that the unforeseen does happen.
Are all piano movers similarly insured?
Sadly, the answer to this question is no.
There are 3 types of insurance to consider when hiring a piano mover:
1. Commercial/automotive insurance: Is the company insured against damage to property and or vehicles?
2. Cartage/content insurance: Is the company insured against damage to the piano?
3. Workman’s Safety Insurance: Is the company insuring its workers against injury?
Some piano moving companies are insured for 1 or 2 of these types of insurance, but not all 3. It is the buyer’s responsibility to make sure that he/she is properly insured, not the moving company. It is a good idea to ask about these 3 types of insurance when you are phoning piano moving companies, and also to ask what amount of insurance your piano will be covered for. A properly insured moving company should provide you with a Bill of lading, which is a legal document stating what is being moved, the names of all parties involved in the move, where the piano is being moved from and to, and the full declared insured value of the instrument. The Bill of lading should also include the moving company’s terms of cartage. As a legal document, a proper bill of lading helps to ensure that the piano mover will repair any damages that were incurred during the move (unless a damage waiver was signed). It is also important to note that any damage caused to your piano or your property must be noted on the bill of lading to ensure that you have proper recourse if any action is needed.
Why is worker injury important to me?
You may be wondering why it is important that you ensure that the piano mover you hire has Workman’s Safety Insurance. When you contract a moving company, they are considered your employee for the time that they are working for you. If you hire a moving company that is not covered for Workman’s Safety Insurance, you are accepting full liability for any employees who are injured while working for you. Your liability will extend to medical bills, lost wages and possibly civil law suits. A company who is covered for Workman’s Safety Insurance will take care of most of these problems for you. Some companies do not pay their required insurance premiums and are therefore not covered for all injury insurance claims. You may ask the company that you are hiring to provide you with an up-to-date workman’s safety insurance clearance certificate, in order to ensure that you are properly covered. To be absolutely sure that the moving company’s coverage is up to date, you can contact your local Workman’s Compensation or Workman’s Safety Insurance board to check on the company’s status.
Does moving the piano affect the sound of my piano?
The actual move of the piano does not affect the sound or tuning of a piano. Generally piano tuning is affected by changes in temperature and humidity which cause the wooden and steel parts of your piano to expand and contract. You will probably need to tune your piano a few weeks after moving it, after it acclimatizes to its new location. Other factors that may affect the sound of your piano are the size and acoustics of the room in which the piano is located. Carpet absorbs sound, while hardwood reflects it. Sound reinforces in small spaces, seeming louder, while in large spaces the sound gets lost, seeming quieter.
How much does it cost to move a piano?
Piano moving is generally billed in one of two ways:
1. The household mover way – hourly rate, with a minimum number of hours (usually min. = 3 hours)
2. The professional piano mover way – flat rate based on the following factors:
a. Type (upright, grand) and size of piano
b. Distance being moved
c. Difficulty level due to stairs, grass pulls, tight turns etc.
d. Time restraints place on the move
e. Waiting time that might be incurred.
The advantage of a flat rate system is that, barring any unforeseen events, you be able to get an accurate idea of what the move will cost you before the movers arrive at your house and it is often less expensive than the hourly rate.
How much notice do I need to give the Piano Mover?
The amount of notice needed will depend on when and where you need the piano to be moved. Most piano movers book their deliveries on a first come, first served basis. If it is a high traffic time of year, you may need up to one month’s notice. In a lower traffic time of year, you may only need one or two day’ notice. Generally, if you need your piano moved on a specific day, you should book the delivery well in advance to make sure it’s available to you.
Below are listed some recommended questions to ask when you are looking to hire a piano mover:
How long have you been moving pianos?
Do you have any references?
Do you have full-time, trained staff moving pianos for you?
How do you charge for moving, and what are your rates?
What days of the week do you move pianos, and what is your availability?
Are you covered for Commercial/automotive insurance, Cartage/content insurance, and workman’s safety insurance?
Will you provide me with a copy of your workman’s safety insurance clearance certificate?
What amount will my piano be insured for during the move? What does this insurance cover?
What are your terms of cartage? Will you provide me with a copy?
Will I be provided will a bill of lading when my piano is moved?
Listed below is the information that you should have prepared when you book your piano move:
What type of piano is it that you require to be moved? (Upright or Grand Piano)
What size of piano is it? (upright pianos are measured by height [floor to lid] and grand pianos are measured by longest length [keyboard to curve in bow end])
Where is it being picked up from? (Have full address including postal or zip code)
Where is it being delivered to? (Have full address including postal or zip code)
Are there any stairs that the piano needs to go up or down (inside and outside)? If so, how many? Are they straight, spiraled or curved? Based on what you tell the piano mover, he/she will tell you how many people they believe it will accomplish your move. Missing important details or difficulties, or miss-estimating your move based on the information you have provided could mean that your piano move might not happen that day, and could incur you more charges.
When are you looking to have the piano moved?
Are there any time restraints involved? (As time-restraints tend to hamper the efficiency of the mover’s day, placing a time-restraint on the mover could more than double your cost.)
Inform the piano mover of any problems that you can foresee ahead of time.
The more information you can provide the piano mover, the more accurate your quote will be. If you are vague and provide few details, do not be surprised if you incur extra charges for your move. A good, reputable piano mover will make the process as painless as possible for you and usually be the highlight and most stress-free part of your whole moving process. They key is ensuring that the mover meets all of your requirements and providing them with the information they need to help you properly.
The most serious piano teachers will adamantly point their students in the direction of an acoustic piano. For serious piano studying, I agree with this completely for reasons I will discuss shortly. But for many reasons, a genuine handcrafted instrument may not be the best choice for you. With the affordability, portability, and the many features that come with digital pianos, you may wish to head the other way. Summarily, the question of acoustic versus digital boils down to a matter of authenticity versus everything else.
Mostly, the drawbacks of an acoustic piano are matters of practicality, such as price. For what you could get a new, decent quality digital piano with, you’ll be dealing with a rather meager acoustic. This can encompass a number of problems. For instance, aside from any tuning it might need, the overall sound quality of a cheap acoustic piano can be quite poor. This may not just be an issue of bad strings, but can result from an infinite number of possible factors arising from any of the complex mechanics of the piano being in disrepair. Other common problems of old pianos are broken keys and sticky keys, which is when the keys fail to spring up the way they should. There may also be faults with the framework that can range from nuisances to impending hazards. The list of the possible troubles of a bad acoustic continues indefinitely, and it is likely that the piano will need a decent amount of initial maintenance, in addition to periodic maintenance, which is likely to pull a few additional large bills out of your wallet right way.
Also, because of its bulk and weight, an acoustic may be a very difficult accommodation for people living in tight or elevated spaces, such as dorm rooms and certain city apartments. Some buildings may even prohibit pianos, particularly on floors above the ground level, because the weight and bulk of pianos make them quite cumbersome and possibly hazardous to either the tenants or the buildings themselves. This raises the issue of portability as well. Do you gig? Do you relocate frequently? Toting a 500 pound upright piano isn’t possible for most people; moving one across the room is a challenge for most people. If your music should ideally be ready to go, your hulking wooden companion is not going to be sympathetic.
Acoustic pianos also lack the many features present in digital pianos nowadays that may be valuable tools to you. For example, volume control may be necessary in dormitory, or close living, situations. Newer digitals also come with a suite of onboard functions, including on-the-fly recording, voice customization, electronic metronome, and even music mixing features, which you won’t have. You will also lack the benefit of porting your music to your PC; a simple MIDI connector would feed your performance directly into your computer’s audio card without any ambient noise or loss of sound quality, which will probably beat any recording made with an acoustic piano and consumer grade recording hardware available at a neighborhood electronics store.
In light what you’re giving up in bells and whistles, surely you will be at a degree of inconvenience being committed to an acoustic piano. Still, despite the great deal of effort digital piano makers have put into their product, none have been able to truly reproduce the sound and feel of a good acoustic piano. First, lets talk about the piano sound. To most people, casual or occasional listeners of piano music, the sounds made with an acoustic piano and a digital piano are quite identical and equally satisfactory musically. But listen closely, because there is an important difference.
A digital piano outputs high quality recordings of the sounds that were made by a real piano at one time. During the process of making a digital piano, each key of a real concert grand piano is struck a number of times at varying velocities and recorded with sophisticated equipment. This array of high quality recordings will serve as the digital voice, and will give the digital piano a rather broad range of tonality and an overall likeness of an acoustic piano in varying music dynamics. But once the notes have been recorded and finally integrated with the digital piano’s voicing mechanism, they are never going to be changed. Even though the aesthetic quality of the sound may be state of the art, it is the way the sounds should behave but cannot because they are fixed recordings that is the fundamental problem of digital pianos.
An acoustic piano uses a complex array of hammers, strings, a soundboard, and other moving parts that function in collaboration. This means that when any note is played, it is not played with entire independence, but is highly affected by the current state of the surrounding components of the piano. For example, playing a chord on a digital piano will simply result in three notes being played, as they were recorded individually, at the same time, whereas with an acoustic piano, the three notes will interact with each other through the soundboard and become a stew of vibrations, producing a different, more complex, and ultimately richer sound. Lacking this quality of pliability, what comes out of digital speakers will typically be quite simplistic and boring, and will be most unsatisfactory to aficionados of the true piano tone.
An acoustic piano is also an analog instrument, which means is has virtually infinite range. For example, there is no limit to the loudness or softness a note may be played on an acoustic piano. With digital pianos, there is a point at which a minimum or maximum will be achieved. This means there will be occasions when you will not be able to play a note as softly or as loudly as you wish. In order words, true pppp or ffff are probably beyond the scope of digital pianos without you resorting to adjusting the volume dial while you’re performing. Even if you were to do that, the tonal quality of the notes would remain static from that point on, when it would further continue to dull or brighten on an acoustic piano.
Another problem of digital devices is the matter of intervals. In photography, for example, pixels are the intervals. With a traditional film camera, the amount of detail you are able to capture is theoretically unlimited because film is a single and continuous malleable body. The “film” of a digital camera is not single or continuous but is a multitude of pixels, each of which is only able to record a solid block of color. The amount of detail a digital camera is able to capture will depend on how small the pixels are and how tightly they’re packed together. If the pixels, or intervals, are small enough and packed closely enough, the amalgam of the blocks of color they record will appear to be smooth curves and gradients to the human eye.
There is a similar issue of intervals with digital pianos, which is mainly the issue of touch sensitivity. Digital pianos have a finite number of intervals when it comes to key pressure. The more intervals there are and the closer they are to each other, the more realistically the piano will respond to your dynamics. High end digital pianos will have quite a lot of them. But digital pianos within the means of average shoppers may not have sufficient sensitivity. This means that while the vast difference between piano and forte may be noticeable, the most intricate variances of touch pressure may be disregarded. This will be quite a nuisance to pianists seeking a highly responsive instrument, particularly when it comes to meticulous classical music.
It also manifests in pedaling. Piano pedals are ranged. Between simple on and off, or up and down, there are degrees. “Half-pedaling” and “quarter-pedaling” are crude terms describing the manner of pedaling in which the pedal is only pressed partially down in order to create an intermediate effect. For instance, rather than completely depressing the pedal so that the full brilliance of a note is sustained, you may wish to depress it only half way to dampen about half of the note and let only the remainder of it sustain for a subtler, suppressed quality. Certainly a scrupulous pianist will wish to employ the complete range of pedaling available to him, which may not be represented entirely accurately in a digital piano.
Aside from sound, as mentioned previously, key touch is also an important issue. Digital piano makers these days have gone to great lengths to reproduce the feel of acoustic pianos. For the most part, they’ve done a good job. They’ve even gone as far as implementing graded hammer action, which is in line with the hammers of acoustic pianos gradually becoming lighter from left to right. As a matter of fact, if you could take a look at the inner workings of a digital piano, you would be quite surprised and impressed with the complexity of the hammer mechanics. However, as long as digital pianos look the way they do, being the shape and size they are, there is going to be a limit as to how authentically the key feel can be made.
The hammers in a digital piano are simply extensions of the pianist’s fingers. When the pianist presses a key down, it will raise the opposing side of the lever, which touches an electronic pad inside the piano that serves as the string. The hammers in an acoustic piano do not behave this way. Instead of being extensions of the pianist’s fingers, they are rather like projectiles that are sprung at the strings high above them. Imagine the carnival game where you hit the pad on the ground with a mallet, which flings a projectile up the meter towards the bell at the very top. The finger is the mallet, the visible piano key is the pad, the hammer inside the piano is the projectile, and the string is the bell. First of all, this means if you press a key all the way down but not with the minimum amount of force needed, the projectile hammer will never leave its seating and the string will actually never be struck. On the part of the pianist, this launch-pad-like action will need a slightly different technique than the seesaw-like action of digital piano hammers, predominantly in difficult works. Secondly, it will feel noticeably different under the fingers.
The only way this can truly be reproduced in a digital piano is by the use of bona-fide acoustic hammers. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. But the problem is there isn’t enough room for them inside the compact size of most of the digital pianos today. That’s why as long as they look the way they do, the action of digital pianos will not feel completely akin to that of acoustic pianos. Certain higher end models do integrate the acoustic hammer action simply to recreate the key feel. Even higher end models, which are called “silent pianos,” integrate strings as well and are bona-fide acoustic pianos with the added ability to remove the strings from the action and toggle on digital mode in order to provide volume control! But these tend to be even more expensive than acoustic pianos.
In terms of what the average piano shopper will be able to afford, the difference in the overall performance between a digital and acoustic piano will be stark. To restate what I said at the beginning of the article, it really boils down to the authenticity versus everything else. And the authenticity is usually going to cost you more to get. What you should think about is how important it is to you that the piano truly resembles an acoustic. Are you a classical piano student looking at a long road of perfection and possibly a career as a concert performer? Then a digital piano is probably not what you want to be practicing on, even as a temporary substitution, because there is a good chance it will hurt your technique. It is possible to get financing on an acoustic piano, so I would recommend going that route, using your budget of cash as a down payment. If this is not necessarily what you have in mind for your musical venture, then perhaps a digital piano is all you require. Depending on your needs, it may not be a mere reduction of an acoustic, but a substantial upgrade with all the features you’re going to get. Typically, a digital piano will be more than enough to satisfy one’s musical appetite.