Elaine, I venture to suggest that you are ahead of me, except that even you cannot play all those instruments simultaneously…
I used to live near Nashville, Indiana, and was very pleased to be able to hear and enjoy Bill Monroe and his colleagues at Bean Blossom.
David
You’re right there!! 
However, I’m sure your expertise is ahead of mine, especially in the tech field!
I just enjoy playing, teaching Piano, harmony and theory, and a bit of conducting (run our local community choir), but my mandolin is nowhere near as good as Bill Monroe! How wonderful to have seen him. 
With the way you two keep suggesting one is ahead of the other, maybe we should have a playoff? 
In the late 1970s Hon No.1 Daughter (who was taking piano lessons) came with us to a concert of Early Music in a local church by the “Modi Gaudio Consort.” It featured a work colleague on a beautiful harpsichord he had built himself.
During the interval we went for a chat and she asked if she could have a go on the harpsichord. Naturally he said yes. She played Greensleeves, and this was perfectly contemporary with the music they had been playing. My colleague was most impressed by her ability and choice of music.
Unfortunately so was Hon No.1 Daughter. She was smitten by the harpsichord and no longer wanted to learn piano! And we had just bought a rather nice piano to replace the previous ropey one we had been given for free. Sadly, we never did find a harpsichord for her…
Richard,
You are lucky you only had to deal with the piano and not the harpsichord.
The problem with the harpsichord is that is is a temperamental beast and, unless you are independently wealthy, you have to maintain it yourself. Unlike even a crummy piano, the tuning of the harpsichord depends greatly on the relative humidity (RH) of the atmosphere in the room. The frame of the harpsichord is entirely of wood, which moves about with the RH and thus changes the tension of the strings. The severity of this depends upon the season. Sometimes it is necessary to tune the instrument every few days, sometimes it will go for a few weeks without attention. This frequent need to tune would be a bit of a strain on the time and ability of a student player.
Another thing that can happen in conditions of very low RH is that the wood tries to stretch and can crack. This is obviously fatal for the instrument, and because of it I have to have a humidifier in here in the winter to keep the RH above 40% or so. The humidifier needs filling with water daily. I have only this week discontinued use of my humidifier, as the seasons have changed. This was less of a problem in the 17/18th century, as buildings were neither well sealed nor heated, as ours are in the winter, thus RH stayed high enough; but the upside of keeping the RH up to a reasonable level is that my fingers do not get painful cracks!
This humidity problem affects all musical instruments made of wood. (At least they dont go rusty, like cars!)
Sorry for the long diatribe!
David
As a carpenter, I understand entirely!
Our first (free) piano was old, Victorian, and the central heating effectively destroyed it, partly because it had a two-part frame! However, being solid wood it lasted by far the longest of three in a piano smashing contest.
The second had the one piece metal harp and could actually be tuned to pitch instead of a semitone low. But it also was slightly affected by the heating. Bought from the first piano teacher when she retired to an old peoples home (with its baby grand), sold for a profit to another learner via the piano tuner.
The third was an import from Hong Hong bought from an Airline stewardess (cheap air freight!) and that was amazing how it held its tune and the action was superb. Bought via the piano tuner and sold through him a couple of years later for a fat profit.
Now our only (rarely used) musical keyboard is an old Casio CT460 with sampling and midi, bought in the 1980s to go with my very fat beefed-up Amiga computer and its superb music software. Amiga is long gone to an enthusiast, but the Casio soldiers on.
Back in the 1980s we were given two bust electric organs, and I then quickly sold them again (through the piano tuner) at a profit after I repaired them (easy for a keen young electronic engineer with a can of Servisol and some power transistors) but I would not even think about looking inside a modern computer-based one (nightmare).
My late father had an old Hammond organ that he played occassionally. When he died I had to dispose of it. Turns out nobody wants them any more, or at least they didn’t around eight years ago.
Listed and relisted several times on eBay for £1 from what I remember.
It finally sold and amazingly travelled the world as a stage prop for a tour of ‘The Jersey Boys’ in the Middle East and Asia.
Fame at last!!! (for the Hammond organ - did you have the Leslie speaker?)
Or was that Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames!! 
Think the Leslie speaker was a separate box with whirry spinny bits inside. Didn’t have one of those.
Can’t find any pictures of it as it was a few years ago now. I do remember I spent a while checking that every key, button and stop was working correctly. Then it went to someone that was going to pretend to play it.
Ah the Leslie speaker!
Mention that and a certain name to any of my 1970s work colleagues and they’ll have difficulty in keeping a straight face, even now fifty years later.
We had a self-professed organ nut at work in the early 1970s and he built four different Leslies during months of lunch-breaks, all failures that shook themselves to pieces because he was trying for bigger and better, cluttering up the workshop, and he never realised that beyond a certain size it was just a waste of wood.
We let him get on with it.
But eventually one of our more academic engineers gave him some theory tuition on acoustics and speaker design. The fifth cabinet was smallest, lightest and loudest, with a smaller variable-speed-control 18" vane instead of his previous 36" rotating horns (!) and it actually sounded quite good.
Wikipedia entry for the Leslie speaker makes fascinating reading.
Certainly does make interesting reading, as does info on the early Moogs!
But even with digital sampling the raw sound for both is hard to reproduce! Too pure! 
!!!
On another matter, I gigged at the local folk club last night on my electro acoustic mandolin( plugged in to my Blackstar Fly - all 3 watts of - it great little amp.), during sing around night!
We had trad. vocals. blues, blue grass, original songs, golden oldies, accordion, recorders, - such variety.
Love live music 
So, a bit of moonlighting from our band
Oh no 
! Caught out!
Do we have contracts or is Roadie our lawyer too!
Yes I am prepared to act as defending councel for @elaine-mccarthy.
My client wishes to plead guilty your honour.
As he doesn’t have much to do, he might as well do that.
The roles keep piling up.
I’m doing my best to deligate tasks but so far all I’ve been able to palm off is harpsicord tuning and maintenance.
Talking of Harpsichords and thinking of David our resident expert, it was interesting to hear of the effects of humidity on tuning. As he noted all strung wooden instruments suffer with temp/humidity changes - my clarsach is usually out of tune, when I want to play, so out comes the tuning key and I have to get it back into tune (only 37 strings - less than the harpsichord). Need a good ear - don’t use an electronic tuner!!
So Roadie??? 
OKAY - I’ll tune it myself 
Any more instrumentalists out there 
- we’ll soon be closed down! 
I have never understood why topics have to be closed after 2 months!
David