Monday, September 1, 2003

Hey everybody, on Friday I went to M. Steinert & Sons on Boylston Street in Boston. It's a piano store/showroom. I've always wanted to go in, but felt stupid. But I figured hey, it's my vacation, why not? So I went in and they were very nice and showed me around, then asked me what kind of piano I was interested in - an upright, a grand piano, or a digital piano? I said they should show me the digital (no way we could afford a "real" piano any time soon... new uprights start around $10,000 and go up from there... and for a grand piano, you can at least double that price...). Well, they have some pretty awesome digital pianos nowadays. All the ones in this store, which sells Steinways, are by a company called Roland who have been making digital instruments for about 30 years. Basically, their top of the line model is just under $4,000. So if all my fans out there could get together and pitch in a little money each, I'm sure you could buy one for me. Ha ha.

But anyway, they're really cool because they have weighted action keys so they feel like real piano keys, and they really sound just like a regular piano. Their best model has a really great sound system and it does things like has the bass come from the left and the treble notes from the right... just like a real piano. And while I was there, I even got to find out what the third pedal on the piano does... my family always thought ours was broken and didn't know what it did. But since my parents have a grand piano and the third pedal (actually it's the center pedal) has such an obscure use, it might actually work and we never knew how to use it. It's call the sostenuto pedal. The other two are the sustain and the unacorda.

The most fun thing about it was just that I got to sit in a room for a while playing piano which I haven't gotten to do in a long time. They even gave me a book a music to play from. I played Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata almost well. And then I played Rachmaninov's Prelude in C# minor, which is wicked hard and I never mastered in the first place... so I played it pretty badly... but there were parts where my fingers almost figured out the keys again!

11:02:24 PM  

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