DESIGNER GRAND PIANOS Modern Piano Collection

The top quality pianos (which start at around $75,000 and up) are made by hand and use only the best materials, which frequently call for rare wood varieties such as the highest quality solid spruce for soundboards, exotic wood veneers for the body, and premium materials all across the piano. The felt for the hammers, the pin blocks, and actions parts have to be superior, the string wire, chrome, brass, or gold plated pedals and all the other hardware are too made of superior quality materials. Remember that with a global ban on ivory, today’s brands all have developed and patented their proprietary materials to cover the keys. These feature such high-tech attributes as sweat absorption, enhanced traction, and specific feel – so that each brand produces piano with keys made of their own engineering. All this of course, requires magnificent craftsmanship and thousands of hours of labor to build a premium grand piano. Some instruments take as long as 16,000 hours to make! There are very few piano craftsmen in the world and many have worked for the same manufacturer for generations. This level of know-how goes far beyond the ‘job’ and into the realm of a calling. Like the finest of jewelers and watchmakers, piano craftsmen acquire their skills through apprenticeship from a young age and never stop researching, developing, and inventing. Each legacy brand has dozens of patents on their proprietary architecture and engineering and all of the above is invented by their in-house craftsmen. One of the most frequent areas of the proprietary invention has to do with action responsiveness and amelioration of the tone, which insures all notes across the keyboard sound uniform. Steinway, Fazioli, Bechstein, Bluthner, and Bosendorfer all hold such patents and guard their secrets with utmost care. The other area of patent-held inventions has to do with the stringing of the grand pianos and soundboard construction. Kawai for example, refers to their craftsmen as ‘samurai’ and treats them as guardians of treasured secrets. In comparison, Yamaha dispatched many of their craftsmen to Europe throughout the 20th century to learn from the established European piano craftsmen and then build their proprietary designs on that time-tested knowledge.