Musician builds and plays real LEGO® piano

10 mai 2018

Besides composing and performing, piano player Jeroen van Veen has another passion: LEGO®. He combined these passions and has built a real size LEGO® piano with almost 30,000 second-hand bricks! None of the bricks are glued and it is actually playable and he even has used his LEGO® piano in concerts.

It all started with a discussion between him and his sons at the coffee table. They were wondering if it would be possible to create the round shape of a real grand piano by just using LEGO®. They discovered that the friction between the 2x2 bricks is enough to bend the LEGO® in such a way that it creates the classical rounded piano shape. They decided to build a life-size LEGO® piano using second-hand bricks. Moreover, they decided that is should be transportable and designed in such a way that it would be playable and even suitable for concerts.

It took Van Veen and his sons two and a half years, but all the hard work payed off and resulted in a beautiful grand piano, built out of almost 30,000 bricks. They named the LEGO® piano ‘Van Veen & Sons’, a nod to the famous piano brand Steinway & Sons. Only a small draft was used since van Veen basically had the plan for the whole piano in his head. The piano is built out of black bricks, the realistic internal mechanics are created using plates and the framework is sustained by technical LEGO®. In the end only the keys are not entirely made out of LEGO®. At first Jeroen van Veen wanted to create the keys out of LEGO® too, but the mechanics were not accurate enough and hence a master keyboard was used instead. On top of the piano Van Veen built several modules which contain percussion instruments such as bells, rainmaker and a rattle.

The LEGO® piano sounds amazing as you can hear via the sound cloud link. He has toured the Netherlands with his LEGO® piano concert and LEGO® music and there are already requests to continue the concert tour abroad. We think the result is beautiful and worth sharing. See the result for yourself in the video (with Dutch text) and listen to it on SoundCloud.