Dear List: Here are 2 more cents deviation on the topic of the first piano for the little future pianist to practice on. We've all had this happen. A potential customer calls to ask you for your opinion on "The Cheapest Piano Money Can Buy For My Child To Start Lessons On." "Great! It's terrific that you're thinking of bringing a piano into your family life." You don't have to go on and on with the virtues of studying piano because the customer has already made the decision to go ahead with this, but by all means, be prepared to answer their questions. If they are looking for the cheapest of the cheap "just to see whether or not the kid is really interested," it's time to pull out the analogies in terms of something they already understand. Here in metro Detroit, the sacred car is all-important to many families. You might say something like "now really, do you intend to try to teach your children to drive in a rusted old hulk that can only do about 20 mph with limited steering capabilities? We all know that a car should at least be capable of handling traffic conditions on the main drags in town ...." Most customers know about the car-buying guides commonly available on the market. We know that such a guide exists in the piano market in the form of Larry Fine's book. "May I recommend that you read this book? It gives great descriptions on how to go about looking at a piano yourself from the inside out so that you can evaluate its characteristics relative to your expectations." Questions are more important than lectures, pontifications, or other forms of statement. Asking the questions gets the customers thinking about just what it is they are looking for and what they hope will happen in the future. Some of the questions I ask involve the future. "How soon do you plan to outgrow your first piano?" Other questions ask the customer to put themselves into the places of the children just starting lessons. "Can you imagine the frustration of trying to play a certain excercise only to have the key behave differently every time you try it?" Still other questions aim at evaluating their own children. "How prone is your child to "giving up" when faced with mechanical frustration and failures?" "How sensitive is your child to perceiving the differences between the family piano and the teacher's piano?" Sensitivity to the differences is all too often overlooked by the parents. I still remember vividly as a child (8 or 9 years old) when for some reason my dad decided to visit the Steinway dealer in Boston. I couldn't resist all those big beauties on the floor and just had to try them out. Wow -- these sound like the pianos in the recordings my parents have. Playing them was such incredible good fun that it was hard to go back to the family piano. In another case with one of my customers, the child was allowed to pick out the first family piano of her choice at a used piano sale. She picked a high-quality upright. The parents were a little put out by the price tag at first, but there was no doubt she had befriended that piano. I was asked to do the in-home service. Then she really fell in love with the piano. If truth be known she's still as wild about her piano now 5 years later as she was when she first met it, if not more so. The story goes that whenever her teacher holds a recital, she insists that it be done at her piano, not the teacher's. OK, where's the bottom line to all of this? Encouragement. You're delighted that the customer has decided to bring a piano into their lives. The challenge now is to maintain this encouragement through the purchasing of an instrument with plenty of room for musical growth, the establishing of regular service, all to provide the pianist with the encouragement necessary to keep on practicing ... keep on growing ... ... ... ZR! RPT Ann Arbor diskladame@provide.net
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