Customer Reviews

FAO Schwarz Big Piano

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have a 5 and 3 year old. Both kids seemed to like it as much as any other toy piano product. Here are my thoughts:

Good:
-Looks good
-Good Instrument selection
-Recording/playback modes
-Fun concept
-Pre-recorded songs

Bad:
-Defaults to pre-recorded music mode after a few seconds of inactivity, which is very annoying if you're trying to play freestyle (like a real piano).
-Very slippery on a carpet, and slightly slippery on hardwood
-The freestyle mode is actually called "Record", and the pre-recorded mode is called "Play", which is confusing.

Final thoughts:
-The pre-recorded mode is probably meant for kids that have no idea how to play anything and don't care which keys to press, since any white key will play the next note in the song, which doesn't teach them how to play piano at all, and the toy forces this mode onto the player by the very quick timeout I mentioned above. This leads me to believe that it was designed not to teach kids how to play, but to give them the illusion that they're playing something pretty, and thus provide instant gratification. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's what you want for your kids.

We received this from a family member for Christmas. When I looked on Amazon to see what they had paid for it, I was horrified and saddened to know they had wasted so much money. This thing MAYBE contains $10 worth of materials and components. It has a horrible, tinny sound, and worst of all, it can only play one note at a time. No chords, no playing together with someone else. The controls are stupid and too confusing for our 4-year old son to use. Apparently you have to be in "record" mode for it to just act like a piano- otherwise, instead of hearing the note you want, it plays random notes picked from random melodies built into it. It's horrible, not fun, takes up a huge amount of space, until you roll it up and leave it on the curb after 15 minutes.

In other words, this is nothing like "the big keyboard" from the Tom Hanks movie "Big." It's a piece of Chinese junk that is priced about 10x what it's actually worth.

FAOSchwartz Big Piano.Piano seems ok. Do not purchase through Amazon.com or molambooks.Molambooks is greatly overcharging for this piano & Amazon.com won't help with getting any refund because they say its an outside vender and not their problem