Let’s Get NERDIER About LEGO Pianos - Part 2

Today, LEGO introduced a colorful new musical line called Vidiyo. Honestly, AR isn’t my jam so I don’t know what to make of it yet—but I know that Vidiyo involves musical unicorns, gingerbread mermaids, and a lllama! And that clear cube looks ready to MOC and roll. Take my money! The day of this new musical LEGO venture makes for the perfect timing to conclude our Nerdy historical survey of pianos in official LEGO sets.

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Previously On Nerdy LEGO Pianos

In Part 1, we discussed how LEGO began its dolce waltz with the pianoforte in the early 1960s with two large, simple Sampsonite designs. In the following five decades, it released three additional pianos targeted primarily toward girls and zero pianos designed for a general LEGO building audience. The year 2010 brought us a decorative organ in 10210 Imperial Flagship and a piano/organ in that year’s advent calendar (6 plates high) and heralded the start of a new era in LEGO pianos. Both models are simple but convey the instrument for its standard minifig audience. The Flagship’s organ is noteworthy in set design for using clip hinges to symbolize the black keys.

This forte tacet comes as somewhat of a surprise, considering the middle class aspirations for which the piano stood for during those years. LEGO City has always been chock full of cops and firefighters, but none of the houses in that era seem to make room for a piano. (Bueller?)

Perhaps LEGO didn’t want to disturb the unencumbered playtime imaginations of little Suzy and Johnny by reminding them of the tortuous lessons looming in their schedules. (Well, on second thought, maybe Suzy…) Nevertheless, pianos have been a perennial favorite of fan designers. The interwebs are full of original piano MOC designs, each using unique techniques to interpret the instrument.

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Musical Ideas

There seems to have been a steady stream of Cuusuu/Ideas proposals before LEGO released set 21323 Grand Piano last year. In fact, there are currently EIGHTEEN different LEGO Ideas proposals that include pianos up for consideration, not counting the gorgeous Jazz Quartet that already achieved 10k supporters.

I wasn’t able to track the history of all pianos ever submitted to ideas to see what models might have come close, but the model that finally did get made is a real treat. Good things come to those who wait. The Grand Piano is one of the most enjoyable “large sets” I’ve built. It’s sleek and curvy and solidly constructed in all sorts of fun directions, with a classy color scheme and extremely clever techniques.

Despite its piece count, the Grand Piano did not fall into the trap of repetitive “builds inside the build” (I’m looking at you, Tower Bridge) or have tedious tiny bits in similar colors that could throw the whole thing off if not placed in the correct alignment on the exact, hard-to-find/miss stud (ahem, giant Hogwarts Castle book one). The only redundancy in building the piano is the key hammers, and even those have a few iterations and are so pretty that it doesn’t become a chore. It is, however, quite the task to perfectly align the keys, and they tend to fall back out of alignment after the Power Functions play the music.

Personally, I was too busy squealing with delight at the music playing (via an app) and all of the moving parts (including an adjustable bench) to have an issue with that, but I can see how it could trigger OCD in someone more accustomed to finding a constant precision in their LEGO. For the most comprehensive comparison between the LEGO Ideas Grand Piano and a real one, watch this video from Beyond the Brick. It is delightfully nerdy!

And, in case you’re wondering, the LEGO Ideas Grand Piano is made in just the right scale for a LEGO Darth Vader constraction figure to play and no, I’m not going to calculate the plate height on this one. (Alas, his march is not one of the songs on the app.)

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Piano, Not Forte

One more side quest until we get to the main section of this analysis. There’s one crazy cadenza in this symphony. In 2004, LEGO released what feels to me to be the most un-LEGO toy in LEGO history.

Music Composer 3364 was an electronic preschool toy in the Explore/Imagination line. It professes to help foster creativity by enabling budding composing skills. The toy consists of a yellow plastic base with five holes in which one inserts oversized pegs that fit nicely in a toddler’s fist. Each peg illustrates that it carries the sound of an instrument; and surprise, one is a piano.

When a child fits these pegs into the holes, they can layer synthesized sounds in a preset song. The pegs also fit in the other base sets like the Music Tapper, Twister, and Roller. Fortunately, I didn’t have kids in 2002. The sounds created by these toys are the tinny ones expects from cheap plastic. There are zero connection points anywhere that would allow one to integrate it with THE SYSTEM. This is the one LEGO toy I honestly would not have welcomed gladly into the home.

Remember how LEGO almost lost the ship way back when? This toy exemplifies how far afield the company wandered during that time. Let’s press the middle pedal and mute this from our collective memory.

Instead, today we’ll talk about pianos designed to be played by LEGO minifigures!

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A Decade Jubilee Of LEGO Minifigure Pianos

In 2012, pianos were popping up all over in the land of minidolls, aka Heartlake City. But it wasn’t until 2014 that they made their way to larger LEGO universe, in Creative Ambush set 70812 (5 plates high), a set from The LEGO Movie. There’s a scene in the movie in which Vitruvius plays a honky-tonk version of “Everything is Awesome” at the Western saloon. Creative Ambush takes that piano to the skies, in a sharp-shooting saloon aircraft. Pew pew!

This notion makes a reprise five years later in the Systar Party Crew 70848. Metalbeard reinvents himself with Unikitty and Benny at the Shimmer and Shine Sparkle Spa using elements from his past, including TWO of those swanky new keyboard tiles. Party time. Excellent.

Speaking of excellent, play that word again in your head, but this time in Mister Burns’ voice… “Eeeehxcellent.”Are your fingertips tapping greedily against each other?

Redirect that melomania to set 71006 Simpsons House (2014). That iconic family’s middle-class fortress provides what decades of LEGO buildings could not: an actual piano for the homes of minifig civilians. In fact, the Simpsons got a purple piano! And it is a purple piano scaled perfectly to the LEGO minifig universe, with the keyboard standing at six plates high (as per the math outlined in part one of this series). The piano is featured in several Simpsons episodes, and this is a very cute model. It even has pedals!

In 2017, a piano finally appeared in a modular building, Assembly Square 10255. The ballerina needs music to dance to, and this 6-plate-high upright keeps her en pointe. [Funny story: before I realized that this model came from a set, I accidentally reverse engineered it from a photo taken at an odd angle. I saw it as five plates high, but #wildorson likes my slightly more compact version.]

In the final years of grille tile keys, LEGO piano designers knocked it out of the park. We got a phenomenal skeleton organ in the Goonies Dimensions Level Pack 71267 (6 plates high, and if it’s not an A sharp, we’ll all B flat!) and the elegant grand piano in Joker Manor 70922 (6 plates).

Having built all forty-three official LEGO piano models, this is my favorite (aside from Ideas), hands down. Every LEGO house in the City would look better with one of these in it. It’s sleek, with a sweet functioning lid. It’s also the only LEGO piano with a keyboard five studs wide, giving us 25% more keys to play with. Sweet! I say, “Pianos for all!” You shouldn't need a Wayne family fortune to have a plastic piano.

In 2019, those lovely keyboard tiles entered the element vocabulary, making an appearance in Central Perk 21319. At 7 plates high with telescope legs, this model is reminiscent of something for those other LEGO Friends. I guess we’ll have to keep hearing Smelly Cat without an accompaniment. It’s obvious from the following photo that by now I had clean run out of 2x6 black plates and had to improvise. Sorry about that.)

2020 gave the minifig universe four additional pianos: a stunning advent entry in the Harry Potter Advent Calendar 75981 (5 plates high), a model using really cool technic brick techniques in Elf Clubhouse 10275, a delightful 5-plate-upright in Hidden Side’s Mystery Castle 70437, and a second spooky-themed instrument in the Creator Expert Haunted House 10273.

We should rest with a fermata and stare an extra couple beats at that Haunted House organ. They really pulled out all the stops (teehee). The design is on fire, with its use of the candlestick element as pipes (gold in the set, but I only have white), and at 7/9 plates, the ergonomics are completely appropriate for a ghost.

[NOTE: I again used blank 1x2 and 1x4 white tiles in my recreations instead of the printed keyboard tiles because my Bricks and Pieces order STILL hasn’t shown up yet. You are again seeing the illusion of Photoshop, this time from another wonderful BrickNerd contributor Pedro Sequeira.]

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Bigger Brick-Built Beauties

If you’re aching to build a bargain synth that’s not to minifig scale without grilles or keyboard tiles, Classic Bricks and Ideas 11001 is available now. This is the first distinctly oversized model since the player pianos of the 1960s.

Despite its fall in popularity as a piece of iconic middle-class furniture, we find ourselves now in a golden age of LEGO pianos. The more the merrier!

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Play That Nerdy Music

Let me hear a CHA-ART! (CHA-ART!) Can I have a LE-GO? (LE-GO!) Sure, it would be much cooler if [insert your favorite cool musician] were leading the call and repeat. Don’t you miss concerts? Still, let’s have a LEGO Chart. #ILOVECHARTS

The data for LEGO piano heights in sets targeted at a general audience is very straightforward. Of the seventeen sets in consideration, four are 5 plates tall, five are 6 plates tall, one is 7 plates tall, and seven are “other/doesn’t matter” (including the oversized Samsonite and Ideas models). Almost all of the pianos created for minifigures to play fall in the ergonomically optimal range of five or six plates high. Four of them even have pedals! What lucky figs. Rock on!

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A Few Stray Notes

One lesson I learned researching this topic is that LEGO pianos are not always where you’d expect to find them… but sometimes they are where you don’t. Mos Eisley was a no-go with the Cantina, but there is an “almost-piano” stuck Jabba’s Sail Barge 75020 on Tatooine. If you are so inclined, the internet is always here to help one become even nerdier to show how the movie version looked more like a piano. If you ask me, the construction highly resembles the drums in Ewok Village 10236. But those nerds call it a “piano” and as a nerd myself, I trust other nerds who know their stuff. They also say that it’s meant to be played with the alien’s feet. That’s pretty cool—I guess I’ll build it, after all.

Continuing my quest, I turned over every orc in Mordor and every rock in Elvendale, and I understand that playing piano would be the most un-stealthy trick in the book, making it a Ninja-no-go. In some places like Mata Nui you don’t expect to find a piano, but you’d think that the Trolls universe would be bursting with synths. Alas, DJ equipment makes for a more portable world tour.

You will, however, find a keytar in Vibe City Concert 41258. Just like the 80s Musician Collectible Minifigure, the Trolls apparently play the keytar with the keys upside down too! Fortunately, LEGO has corrected this error in the Vidiyo collectible series available in Bandmates “Alien Keytarist” blind boxes today.

There are also two piano models that are “almost canon” in the LEGO universe: The Mixels Piano (2016) is listed as part of the Mixies tribe. It was not an official set, but was more of an alt build you could “Murp Max Mix” it online with instructions here. [Hey, looks like it has Nerdly on the brain!]

And Jonas Kramm designed a superb instrument in the Wild West Saloon that was part of BrickLlink’s AFOL Designer Program in 2019. I only learned about it at the last grace note from my fellow BrickNerds, and it is a cherry on top. It’s almost as wonderful as the piano in Joker’s Manor. In just a handful of bricks, we get straight to the point. THAT is a piano! (Unless it’s a pianola… which is plausible.)

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D.C. al fine - Eine Kleine MOC-Musik

After building some seventy LEGO pianos (the pianos that appear in official sets and many reverse engineered MOCs), I probably need this piano showroom modular on Rebrickable!

To put this project to rest with a proper glissando, I felt that I should pay tribute to my own hardworking instrument—my old trusty upright. Piano MOCs come in many sizes and varieties, but in all my searching I had not noticed any that try to fit in all 88 keys. (This doesn’t mean that those MOCs aren’t out there. It only means that I did not find them.)

Since it didn’t already feel “done”, I decided on representing the full keyboard as my MOCing goal. I took lots of measurements and began building… but… after putting together the keyboard and the spinets, I knew for sure that I did not own enough brick to finish the task. (My sorting is endless, but my collection is not bottomless. Shocking!)

Fortunately, I knew that I had a case of “dirty brick” that I had bought off someone in my LUG (back in “the people days”). They had spray painted a load of light blue bricks pink for a project that was later disassembled. I expected to use it as hidden filler, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Sure enough, building this piano took the ENTIRE case—every last brick!

Long story short, my grand finale MOC does not end on a perfect chord. With its messy color scheme, it’s a C7 at best. But the shape is spot on, and I did achieve my goal in representing the full keyboard. “That works for jazz!” In fact, I’m kinda proud of how the key lid pushes back and forth with a smooth function. I had to experiment with several different solutions before landing on a good one.

I find it poetic that the MOC of my cheap piano ended up about the same size as the LEGO Ideas Grand Piano that started all this. Next time I come across a case of pretty reddish-brown brick (and slopes, and arches, and tiles), I can fix up my piano MOC. Then they will make a pretty pair. Just like my real piano, I know that my colorful LEGO version can do its job, even if it needs some extra attention to bring its art fully to life.

In summary, the internet is known for feeding a nonstop feast of things that appear practically perfect. Not here, not today. One of the beauties of building with LEGO is that you really only need to please yourself. The System will make room. I have sated my appetite for LEGO pianos; I’m pleased for now.

And since LEGO itself has used dozens of unique designs for a piano (and keeps inventing more), what is “perfect” anyway? It’s OK if this MOC or yours is a little out of tune, as long as the music plays on.

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Did we miss any LEGO pianos in our musical series? Let us know in the comments below.

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