My best lockdown whim was buying a digital piano off Gumtree. A close second was the 400 banana breads. Not even
featuring is the sourdough starter my friend gifted me, that I immediately killed.
I played piano as a child. I got to Grade 3, hated sight-reading, hated classical music, hated scales, and
borderline hated my teacher. A lot of hate. A lot of complaining. Eventually my parents gave in and let me quit.
For this, I deeply resent them. You hear of those extremely pushy parents who force their children into great
success and unhappiness. Could've used some of that. Apparently most kids who do piano get to Grade 3 and give
up. Anyway, the point is, I should be better than I am since I did actually learn it for a number of years. But
even if I'll never be a concert pianist, I actually enjoy it now. Because it turns out, learning Linkin Park
songs off YouTube is more fun than having a terrifying woman gently rap your knuckles when you play your
arpeggio wrong. Who knew.
I didn't want a real piano. I understand this to be an extremely controversial opinion. Real pianos are
heavy, mostly out of tune, and expensive. Sure they may sound better (if they're decent), but I'm not good
enough to warrant that anyway. And if you're learning off YouTube you really need the thing to be in tune.
But aesthetically, real pianos are obviously much nicer. Completely useless real pianos are knocking about
all over the place. Unplayable, pretty, and free, because no one wants to move them. So I had a genius (or
sacrilegious, depending on how much of a snob, I mean purist, you are) idea. Get one of these defunked
pianos, pull out the insides, and sit mine inside. So here begins the tale of my homemade hybrid piano.
The before. It's fine, but it lacks aesthetic appeal.
This is the Pianodrome. Built from pianos. They also have stuff dotted around the city. There's a piano hut
at the top of Middle Meadow Walk in Edinburgh.
Gumtree has a plethora of free pretty pianos but I quickly learned some devastating facts. Firstly, though
not bulky, my digital piano wouldn't fit inside the shell of most of them. Secondly, some of them were in
decent condition, therefore not a good candidate for gutting. Thirdly, while technically free, it costs
between £500-£900 to deliver a piano to your house depending on how many flights of stairs you have (one, in
my case). That final fact was almost the nail in the coffin of the whole endeavour until I found out about
The Pianodrome. They take old pianos and restore
them to sell on if they're good enough, or scrap them and build incredible stuff if they're not. They hold
concerts and workshops and give you tea if you pop by and are all round excellent folk. I told them about my
plans and they helped me find an ideal piano. Better yet, they helped me gut it on-site (they teach you how
to do this and have all the proper tools) and pull out the catastrophically heavy harp. So I was left with a
perfect piano shell.
It called to me. Or rather, there were only 2 of a suitable size that were certified Trash by the
Pianodrome, and this was the prettiest.
We did a size check with the keyboard. Already looking decent.
I learned a lot about pianos from their workshop. The reason it's cripplingly heavy is this massive metal
harp. It took 3 of us to pull it out. We also had to cut each string individually, though it becomes oddly
therapeutic after a while.
And here it is - a piano-shaped shelf.
The first step was leave it gathering dust in the sitting room for a few weeks while I contemplated the next
step – the shelf. The piano had to sit inside, on top of something hidden, and have the lid close over it.
My dad was coming over to help, but one day I simply couldn't wait any longer and decided to start.
It turned out the existing structure wasn't bad. The front was too big. I needed to sit the piano so that
the keys were at the same level as they would be normally, and that would be blocked. But that was easy. I
just sawed half of it off from the inside. Next were the sides. They were more awkward and required a chisel
to get in behind. But actually with these bits cut back, the level was perfect. I genuinely could not
believe how well it fitted. And now step one was complete, the digital piano was inside the shell. And as an
incredible bonus, the lid closed with no adjustments.
This is what the piano was going to sit on. It needed to be cut back to make it a perfect fit.
To be honest, this is just a cool picture of me jigsawing it.
Step three was the doors at the bottom. This piano came with no base front panel, but that was fine because
I had bigger plans. I was going to put an external amp and speakers in there and make two doors out of
expanded or perforated metal so the sound would carry through. So actually having no panel was fine. I
bought a few metal tester sheets from B&Q to see what looked best and went for the Confession Booth
perforated metal in the end (if you grew up in Ireland you'll understand from the picture). It came in a
metre long sheet which was about 300mm too short. So back to the Pianodrome and got a perfectly matching
piece of wood to pad out the centre. They really are so sound. You should go visit it. Honestly.
My dad arrived with the fancier power tools and we made two doors by angle-grinding the sheet in half and
padding the middle. We used two more strips of wood to cover the ragged edge. I think the metal gives it a
bit of a steampunk look. We cut a piece of 2x1 to make a bar across the top of the doors. I'd bought a
second-hand external amp and speakers. Very cheap but I did have to buy new speaker connectors because the
old ones were missing/broken/the wrong type for the amp (honestly, all three). I connected it all up and
tested it out and the sound carried nicely.
There's my dad. The angle grinder is mine but I was too afraid I wouldn't do a precise enough job.
I'm not sure why someone hadn't already fixed these cables but it was an easy job.
The final hurdle was the pedal. I'd be dammed if I was going to go to all this effort and have a visible
digital pedal when there's a beautiful original there. We had many different ideas for using the analogue
pedal to trigger the digital one. It's just a switch, but the pressure is important when you're playing, so
it's not a matter of taking the pedal apart and just sticking the switch part under the pedal mechanism. In
the end, we used the full digital switch in between both pedals with a metal rod across the top to
evenly(ish) distribute the pressure. The metal rod came from a broken silicon gun. It took a lot of tweaking
to get it to feel right but now it's no different to pressing the digital pedal.
There were a few variations of this. We tried operating it from just one pedal but it felt too uneven. It
was incredibly fiddly to adjust and keep taking off the brass pedals.
So tidy.
If I wasn't going to allow a visible digital pedal, I also wasn't going to allow a mess of cables. I now had
the piano power cable and the amp power cable to contend with. So we put a double socket inside the piano,
with one very discrete cable that goes under the piano and hugs the wall back to the actual wall socket.
Very tidy.
What would a DIY blog post be without some failure? Boring. That's what. So here's the failures. We'd
originally thought the whole top bit could be a cupboard because it's empty now. But turns out, that's
really awkward. There was no nice way (that we could think of) to hinge a door and keep everything else
in-tact. So it's not a cupboard. But whatever. The whole thing is still pretty cool. Second failure is the
on switch and the volume control are partially obscured by the bottom of the lid. I have plans to eventually
do something fancy but for now I use a lollipop stick to switch it on.
Every so often my dad calls and asks if I've sorted this out yet. I haven't.
The final product. The picture on top is a framed collage of various things I found inside. The piano was used
in the National Institute for the Blind as far back at least as 1954. As a delicious cherry on top, my mum
reupholstered my old piano stool and gave it to me.
I have to say, doing this was a lot more fun than actually practising the piano. But nonetheless, here’s a
compilation of songs my Grade 3 piano teacher would hate – Black Parade (My Chemical Romance), Numb (Linkin
Park) and All The Small Things (Blink-182, and actually the first thing I learned during lockdown). I’m not
good enough to smoothly link them all together so enjoy the total lack of transitions.