Seriously, how do piano movers/people move grand or baby grand pianos to places, anywhere? But especially to either small spaces, up stairs, or for example, an apartment/penthouse in a tall building in NYC? I know it happens. It seems very difficult. Explain plz haha
edit for punctuation because my keyboard is broken oh 2nd edit – yeah genuinely no pun intended with the word “keyboard”
In: 117
Depends on how far and what obstacles are in the way. I helped run our college’s music dept. and we had a small recital stage with a grand piano, fortepiano and harpsicord. Luckily we never had to move either out of the building or off of the floor they were used on, but the stage was elevated, with a small flight of stairs and wide double doors. 99 % of the time, the Grand was just left on stage – either used in the performance or left to the side as “decoration.” On the rare occasions where we had larger groups and had to move the piano, it was basically brute force – get a few people together, wheel it to the edge and then carefully (with the primary piano instructor looking on with a lot of concern). The legs came off, but I honestly don’t remember if we did for such relatively short distances…the hauling itself would have been much, much easier if we did. The smaller instruments were moved on and off more frequently, and again we usually just gathered up a small crew and moved it.
The college was smart enough (and well off enough) to just invest in duplicates of our larger instruments for our larger down-town performance facility that opened my senior year. For most of my time there though, we frequently did have to move all of our other instruments in and out of the same building, usually via truck. Everything up to our bass drum and largest timpani could be moved (though not easily) by one person on or off stage and down short stairs. We had an ancient elevator that could fit one timpani at a time….and then again brute force getting it up into our truck and unloaded on the other side (finally got a truck with a lift gate my last year there). The biggest challenge was lashing everything down and protecting it with covers during the move itself. Symphony and orchestra moves it almost always took more time preparing to move than actually moving. For marching band, most of the instruments had their own cases, and we had the loading process down to a Tetris-like science, so those moved quickly – except for our front ensemble (mallet percussion mainly)…those were tougher and had to be protected a little more carefully….and we certainly never almost drove away with the back door unlatched and nearly wrecked a few thousand dollars worth of instruments..
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