VERMILLION, S.D. (KCAU)– Roughly a hundred music fans came out to the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, Saturday for its grand reopening, after half a decade of being closed.

The Music Museum has been closed due to renovations and additions. Museum officials said the results were worth the wait.

“It’s the Disneyland of museums,” said Scott Lawrence, with the National Music Museum’s board of trustees.

Work to revamp the National Music Museum cost around $11 million, all raised by the museum’s board of directors. Scott Lawrence with the museum’s board of trustees says the upgrades were much needed.

“There’s the old Carnegie library and we renovated that building, totally brought it back to its original state and then we added on the Little Bridge wing which is the new addition to the west side. And then phase two was working on new exhibition design,” said Lawrence.

The museum has seven new galleries filled to the brim with roughly 15,000 instruments.

“People often equate the word museum with old, dusty, and boring and I can tell you this is far from old, dusty, and boring. its instruments combined with world and how music has shaped the business world, how it shaped religion, how it shaped cultures. And the instruments are all woven into stories and interactive videos and those kinds of things that really explain, here’s the instrument and here’s how it’s had an impact on our lives,” said Lawrence.

Tom Sorensen is a Vermillion native that’s been involved with music his entire life and used to attend the museum frequently before it temporarily closed. Sorensen says he loves the changes and additions.

“They did a fabulous job, rather than having to go to a room that has everything of one instrument and a room that has everything of another, they’re all mixed together or they’re in a passage way on the way to the next room,” said Tom Sorensen, an attendee of the National Music Museum.

Improvements for the museum aren’t over. Lawrence told KCAU they’re moving onto phase three of the project which sees renovations to the top floor. Expected to be done sometime in 2024.