01
You pay for the model number
Yamaha prints GHC keyboard with matte black keytops identically across four pianos. Roland prints its line across four more. The money between them is real — it just is not under your hands.
A buying guide built from documents
Buy the action.
Skip the model number.
Four Roland digital pianos. Six hundred dollars between the cheapest and the dearest. Roland prints the same keyboard line on all four, character for character. That one fact is worth more than every review you have read this year, and this guide is forty-four pages of facts you can check the same way.
$27
Read it tonight
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Roland · keyboard specification line
List price
FP-10
88 keys (PHA-4 Standard Keyboard: with Escapement and Ivory Feel)
$499
FP-30X
88 keys (PHA-4 Standard Keyboard: with Escapement and Ivory Feel)
$649
FP-40
88 keys (PHA-4 Standard Keyboard: with Escapement and Ivory Feel)
$749
FP-60X
88 keys (PHA-4 Standard Keyboard: with Escapement and Ivory Feel)
$1,099
One action. Four prices. Six hundred dollars buys speakers, sockets and polyphony — and nothing whatsoever under your fingers. Copied from Roland's own specification pages, not from a review.
Why this exists
The piano trade sells feelings.
This is the paperwork.
Three things cost ordinary buyers real money every week, and not one of them appears in a shop demonstration or a spec comparison video.
02
Nobody can get the part
One maker sells you a complete replacement keybed as a single part number. Another states in writing that it will not sell parts to the public at all. For a third, the part does not exist — not out of stock, absent from the catalogue.
03
The warranty is not what you think
A second-hand piano from a great maker can carry no factory warranty at all, in the maker's own words. And the marketplace listing that saved you eighty dollars may have quietly cost you the cover.
Who it was written for
Four people walk into a piano shop.
This was written for all of them.
The returner
Played as a boy, stopped at seventeen, and is sixty-one now with time and a room for it. Needs to know which action his hands will still be happy on in an hour.
The first-timer
Never owned one, does not read specifications, and is about to be sold a cabinet when what he wanted was a keyboard. The weight test alone pays for this book.
The upgrader
Has a starter board and has been told he needs to spend three thousand. Sometimes true. Usually not, and the chapter on what that money actually buys says which.
The inheritor
A piano arrived from a parent's house. Part three tells him whether anyone can still get parts for it, and part five why the factory warranty did not come with it.
What is in it
Eight parts.
Ten printable cards.
Every figure in here was read off a manufacturer's own page, a warranty document or a parts catalogue, and dated. Where a number is not published, the book says so instead of borrowing one.
Part one
The Five Laws
The rules that decide every purchase below three thousand dollars, and the one that decides the ones above it.
Part two
What The Action Actually Is
Both identical-string tables, printed in full, with the price each model carries and an itemised list of what the extra money really buys.
Part three
Can Anybody Fix It
The parts matrix. Keybed part numbers and prices, who sells to the public, who refuses in writing, and which maker has no part number at all.
Part four
What the Warranty Says
Term by term, by brand: who covers labour, who pays the postage, who sends a technician to your house — and which exclusion is written to cover key noise.
Part five
The Second-Hand Trap
The clause that voids factory cover on a used instrument, quoted in full, plus the published list of sellers one maker tells you not to buy from.
Part six
How To Actually Buy
Minimum advertised price and the one word in the rule that changes everything. The trade-in mechanism. And why a bigger discount often means a worse deal.
Part seven
What $3,000 Really Buys
Honestly. Three things at that price are genuinely worth the money and the rest is the cabinet — including one console that shares everything with a cheaper one.
Part eight
Ten Printable Cards
The weight test, the keybed search, the questions to ask about labour and freight. Print them, fold them, take them to the shop.
One page from part three
This is the level of detail.
Yamaha · P-145 / P-225
Keybed, one part number
"Remove eight screws marked S20A. The keyboard assembly can then be removed." — factory service manual, page sixteen
One bolt-in module, around three hundred and eighty dollars, and the same part number covers three different pianos. Boards and contact strips are stocked new.
Kawai · policy
No part number at all
"Kawai spare parts are not available to the general public." — Kawai's own support page
A fine instrument. But when something fails you depend on the maker rather than on any competent technician, and that is worth knowing before it happens.
One version. Everything in it.
What you get for less than
one visit from a tuner.
The Honest Piano Guide
$27
- The Honest Piano Guide — 44 pages, eight parts
- The Piano Field Kit — ten printable cards, separate file
- The keybed lookup sheet, every maker on one page
- The warranty sheet, term, labour and who pays the freight
- Every price dated. Free corrections for life.
30-day money back. Email and you get your money back. No form, no argument.
Before you buy
Fair questions,
straight answers.
Is this about digital pianos or acoustic ones?
Mostly digital, because that is where most of the money is wasted and where the documents are clearest. Two parts cover acoustic buying — the warranty clause that catches second-hand buyers, and the discount-off-list chapter, which is entirely an acoustic problem.
Will the prices be out of date?
Some of them, quickly. That is why every price is dated on the page it appears on, and why the book is built to teach the method rather than the numbers. The keybed search works in five years. The four-hundred-and-ninety-nine-dollar figure will not.
Are there affiliate links?
None. No sponsors, no brand ever paid for a mention, and nothing in here earns a commission if you buy it. That is also why some well-liked instruments come out badly and one unfashionable one comes out on top.
I already own my piano. Is this any use?
Parts three and four are, and they are the ones owners write to me about. What breaks first, what the part costs, whether your maker will sell it to a technician, and what your warranty actually covers as opposed to what the shop said.
Do I need to understand specifications?
No. Every technical claim is translated into what it means for your hands, your room or your wallet, and the ten printable cards are written to be used by somebody standing in a shop who has never read a spec sheet in his life.
Now go and buy the right one.
Read it tonight. Walk into the shop tomorrow knowing which questions have documented answers and which ones nobody can answer at all.
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