Category — Other

 Well, here we are, another incredible year coming to a close, and only a few "shopping" days left before Christmas.

If you enjoy visiting my pianotreasure.com site for piano lovers, there’s probably at least one piano player in you life for whom you’d love to find an appropriate musical or piano-based gift. It could be you! Or any of your piano-playing friends.

If I were Santa, with unlimited cash-flow, I’d come down the chimney in every piano players home in the world, and plop a big hand-made, high-quality grand piano in each living room. Now there’s an amazing visual – to have every family wake up to find a new top-name grand dominating their parlor! Actually, in spite of loving pianos & piano music, many of these families would be quite ticked with me! Not the kids, probably, but the adults would be like, "Now where in the heck are we gonna put THIS!" Times are tight and living spaces have grown smaller.

But alas, I’m not Santa, and grand pianos don’t fit down chimneys. Some of you, who have not been totally crushed by our economic downturn, might actually be getting a new or used piano this Christmas. The piano dealers are hurting, too, and so they’re dealin’ hard. And you can often find great pianos online. For those who already have their dream piano, or simply cannot justify that much largess this winter of ‘09, there’s a slew of fabulous gift ideas for the piano players in your life.

- Every piano and piano player needs accessories:

• Get them a shiny new lamp to sit on, or clamp to, their music desk, so they can read their music more easily

• In our earlier posts on sight-reading we mentioned the need for a metronome. Get them a cool electronic modern beeper or an old-style wooden triangle with the rocking pendulum.

• Many grand pianos could be kept looking newer, with less dust and furniture scratches, if they had a nice cover. There are custom made canvas covers that fit over the whole grand like a glove, or if your a crocheter or quilter, you can make a heartfelt throw to keep their piano top safe.

• How about some player rolls for those piano owners on your list with old-style paper-roll player pianos? There are people unloading these by the box-full, at a fraction of their cost, on the online auctions, and of course the largest player-roll maker, QRS, is still in business, so you can even get brand spanking new rolls.

• For the piano student who has many music books to carry back-&-forth to the teacher’s studio, get them a great carrying bag or case.

- One of the best gifts is music itself:

• Find out who their favorite piano players are and get them some CDs (or an iTunes gift-card) of great recordings. For the Classical pianist, anything by Polini will amaze them, and if they haven’t already heard Van Cliburn’s 1958 interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto #2 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, get it, it will rock their world!

• Good piano players love sheet music and songbooks. Go to your local sheet music dealer and get a $50 gift card, then let them pick out just what they’d love to play. Better still, for adult players, hunt down some rare, old and sometimes beautifully tattered song sheets from the early 20th century.

People give stacks of these away, and sometimes, there’s some amazing gems tucked in the pile. I once found an original 1930s version of Jerome Kern’s "All The Things You Are" that I still treasure.

As the gift giver, a nice touch is to pull out one of the old pieces and frame it for the wall of their music room. Old sheet music can be readily found at local garage sales and, better yet, on online auctions. A wonderful gift!

• And don’t forget beautiful piano music boxes as featured in out earlier post The Art Of Piano Music Boxes

- And of course, my heavily-biased favorite gift:

• Give them a gift certificate to have their piano tuned & serviced by an expert technician. Of all the gifts you can give a piano player, to have a top technician come in and go through their piano top to bottom, leaving it playing and sounding at peak performance, at no cost to them, is a perfect gift! Imagine their delight, next time they sit down to play, and their formerly squeaky, tinny, hard-to-play instrument now sounds rich and responds beautifully to their touch. Goose bumps and long fond memories for sure, of the person who did this for them!