What’s the difference between a regular piano lamp and a grand piano lamp?  Does it really matter what kind of piano you’re buying, or can any piano lamp work for any piano?

Generally speaking, you’re not going to run into a problem buying the wrong kind of piano lamp.  If you’ve got a piano, most piano lamps will work with it.  This is especially true with upright pianos; even a grand piano lamp will easily work with any upright piano.  The only time you’ll run into trouble is if you have a grand piano.

If you’ve got a grand piano and you’re trying to make an upright piano lamp work, sometimes it will.  But sometimes you’ll run into problems.  For instance, some piano lamps are designed to rest behind the music stand and shine over the top onto the sheet music.  With a grand piano, this can cause problems when the top of the piano is raised.  Even if you have the room for the lamp behind the stand with the top raised, you might not want to place a heavy lamp there.  There’s a chance that the lamp will fall, and you don’t want a heavy brass object falling directly onto the strings of your piano.  Using a grand piano lamp will be able to help with these kinds of concerns.

A grand piano lamp is much like a regular piano lamp, but it takes into account the fact that you may not want to have a lamp placed directly onto your piano.  Whether you’re concerned about having the space, keeping a lamp from falling into the piano, or you just don’t want a lamp to be sitting on the piano and muffling or warping the sound, a grand piano lamp will be able to address these issues by simply removing itself from the piano.

One design of grand piano lamp allows a battery-operated lamp to clip onto the back of the music stand.  This keeps the lamp off of the back of the piano – off of the body of the piano itself – while still allowing the lamp to shine directly onto the music. These are usually very small models.

Another design is based on a floor lamp design.  These grand piano lamps are made so that they can bend over the music from a position on the floor.  These are very tall, thin lamps, and their main advantage is their flexibility.