Piatnik musical notes

Musical Notes

Piatnik, 20??

1000 pieces

27" x 19"

purchased new ($18) from these guys in Brooklyn, who, despite there being nothing about it on their website, have a huge selection of puzzles

Difficulty level: very tough

I identified four areas to work on initially: the border, the clefs, the double line down the middle, and the word cresc., which appears throughout in stacks of four. After that, it got tough. Part of the problem is that the pieces have very little variety, and some of the pieces don't actually go where they match/fit, so you have to do a little backtracking.

This is a difficult puzzle in that there are no singular areas to concentrate on; you can't work one area for a while and move on to the next. I find myself sorting the pieces by what is on them (small floating dash, letters/numbers, empty lines, blank space, etc), even though those things don't necessarily go together. I have a feeling this one is going to take a while, even at a mere 1000 pieces.

Next I pulled any piece that was part of a vertical line that separated measures and started making little 2-, 3-, and 4-piece matches.

The I focused on the four big blank lines, and putting together the longer thick black bars.

Once I made enough (very slow) headway comparing each piece with some identifiable marking to the artwork and putting it in place, I sorted the last 200+ pieces (all were the same "two holes, two notches" shape) into vertical and horizontal, and started attacking the horizontal spaces first.

Then it was just a matter of popping the vertical ones into place. When I got to the last piece, I realized that it didn't actually go in the last available slot, so I had to scour the puzzle like a map to find where I'd gone wrong before I could finish.