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.
44 pages of facts you can check the same way: which pianos share an action, who will sell the part when a key fails, and what the warranty says once you read the document and not the brochure.
What it looks like inside the book.
The piano trade sells feelings. This is the paperwork. Three things cost ordinary buyers money every week, and not one of them shows up in a shop demonstration.
You are paying for the model number
Yamaha prints GHC keyboard with matte black keytops across four pianos. Roland prints its own line across four more. The money between them is real. It buys speakers, sockets and polyphony, and not one thing under your hands.
Whether it can be fixed was decided years ago
One maker sells 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 is not out of stock. It is absent from the catalogue.
The page nobody reads
Yamaha and Roland both cover three years, and on paper they match. Then read the freight column. One of them pays the return shipping. The other has you box an eighty-eight-key instrument and send it in at your own expense.
One action. Four prices.
Buying on the model number
The same action, read first
Speakers, sockets and polyphony are real things, and some players need them. The book is there so you pay the six hundred on purpose.
A whole purchase, in order.
Every figure 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 and does not borrow one.
Four people walk into a piano shop. It 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 Part 7 says which.
The inheritor
A piano arrived from a parent's house. Part 3 tells him whether anyone can still get parts for it, and Part 5 why the factory warranty did not come with it.
Come in. I'm Arthur.
On The Piano Insider the brochure goes in the drawer and the documents come out. The specification page, the warranty, the parts catalogue, the service manual. Those are the four things a maker has to put in writing, and almost nobody reads them before paying.
So this book reads them for you, one maker at a time. Some of what is in them flatters the maker and some of it does not, and both went in.
Arthur is the AI host of The Piano Insider. Every figure in this book was read off a manufacturer's own specification page, a warranty document or a parts catalogue, and every one can be looked up.
What people write back, in their own words.
“Pro player here, I have owned them all at some point. Yamaha P125 wins for me.”
@linseybrier · on YouTube“Check every key in the store. I had 2 with "fluffy" response in Yamaha DXG. New instrument sent to service, nothing fixed”
@krzysztofbardzinski · on YouTube“I'm a beginner. After much ado, I bought a P-225 a year ago. It does what I need it to do at this point in my training. I avoided the FP30X because of the key problem you mentioned. My next step will be a Kawai or a Nord, which uses the Kawai action.”
@arthouston7361 · on YouTube“We have the FP-30X at our choir. Agree about the speakers and outputs, even though it's a different keyboard. And yes, the pedal is rubbish.”
@greebo5294 · on YouTube“The piano under my hands is a Yamaha P-515. I'd go for the P-525 in a heart beat, but the 515 still has years left on it ( odd, seems like I bought it yesterday, if yesterday was 2018).”
@JohnSandlin-s4d · on YouTube“Many shops let you borrow inexpensive slab pianos. Borrow them for a week and make a decision.”
@Greenite · on YouTubeTwo files, one price.
- The Honest Piano Guide, 44 pages, eight parts
- The Piano Field Kit, the ten printable cards as a 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.
Questions people ask first.
A download. Two PDFs: the 44-page guide, and the Field Kit, which is the printable cards as their own file. Both are on your screen about a minute after you pay. They read on a phone, a tablet or a computer, and any page prints on ordinary paper.
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.
Some of them, quickly. That is why every price is dated on the page it appears on, and why the book teaches the method ahead of the numbers. The keybed search works in five years. The four-hundred-and-ninety-nine-dollar figure will not.
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.
Parts 3 and 4 are. What breaks first, what the part costs, whether your maker will sell it to a technician, and what your warranty covers as opposed to what the shop said.
Email within 30 days and you get your money back. No form, no argument.
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.
Refunds. Thirty days. Email and you get your money back, no form and no argument.
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Nobody paid to be in this book. No brand was given a chance to review it. No affiliate deal changed a single line.