April 21, 2021

Dear Cherrydale Family,

I have some exciting news!

A couple months ago, an anonymous donor came forward and offered a gift of $25,000 towards our church’s grand piano fund. I don’t think we do emoji’s in official Cherrydale correspondence, so just use your imagination and picture the “mind blown” emoji here!

You may not know this, but our current piano is 50 years old and in desperate need of repair and restoration. It begins to lose its tuning very quickly, within a matter of 2-3 weeks. To compensate for this, we have been having it professionally tuned once a month for the past year or so. For context, a “healthy” grand piano should be tuned only about 2-3 times per year. A thorough inspection back in the summer of 2020 resulted in an estimate of between $30,000 and $40,000 to get the piano back into good shape.

As much as I love our current model, I firmly believe it’s in our church’s best interest to forgo costly and extensive repairs and instead use the generous contribution from our anonymous donor, along with some reserve funds from the capital expenditures budget, to purchase a brand new grand piano. As a result, Jamie Tolosa, our Production Director, and I submitted a proposal with this recommendation to the Elder Council, who agreed and voted to approve the purchase of a new grand piano last week (thank you Elders!).

Now that the purchase has been approved, we are scheduling a “first date” with a new piano this Sunday, April 25th to give it a test drive (it just arrived in the worship center this morning – and it’s super shiny!). If our first date with this loaner piano goes well this week, we will finalize a purchase shortly thereafter.

Here are a few details about the piano that Jamie and I are targeting as a replacement model:

  • Yamaha C5X in polished ebony (we explored the polished mahogany option, but it cost significantly more and is on 12+ month backorder!);
  • It will be 6 feet, 7 inches in length, a foot longer than our current piano; the loaner piano we received today is a 7 foot model (C6X) so the model we would purchase if all goes well is 6 inches smaller;
  • The piano comes equipped with SilentPiano technology, which creates both a natural acoustic sound and sends a matching digital signal to our front-of-house soundboard, to avoid the need for mic’ing.

Jamie and I both are really excited about this potential new addition to our facility, not only because it’s a beautiful addition to the worship center, but more importantly because we believe you will be blessed by the use of this magnificent instrument during our congregational worship!

I look forward to continuing to worship together with all of you. May God continue to lift our hearts in worship to Him and may this new piano bring much joy as we sing His praises together.

Thanks,

David Loebsack
Interim Worship Director