If you're in NYC I highly recommend the tour of the Steinway factory in Queens. You need to make reservations months in advance. It was an absolutely amazing to see the entire process from start to finish. The tooling involved in piano making is unlike anything I'd ever seen.
But skip their Manhattan showroom if you'd like to maintain any respect for the brand. The sales staff was obnoxious enough to make me walk out, checkbook in hand, over to the Bösendorfer store.
In 2013, PBS broadcast a show titled Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 which followed the construction of one of these grand pianos from the selection of materials to the final tunings. The skills required in the construction are very diverse and Steinway has employees who've been doing this work for decades. It is highly precise work. As has been said before, any one can chisel away wood; its knowing what wood needs to be removed that matters.
"As I considered the number 600,000, the Fibonacci spiral came to mind."
Maybe I took this too literally, but 600,000 isn't a fibonacci number, and neither are 6, 60, or 600. Anyone have a better read on what he means by this?
The following sentence explains it. "The way in which [the fibonacci spiral] continues to grow but stay true to its form is very much like Steinway & Sons over these many years."
To me, this is the worst kind of "design". The article only talks about decoration. No mention of music or how the object will be used, whatsoever. Just how fancy the inlays are. </grumpy interaction designer>
Focusing on the details that differentiate it from a "standard" model seems reasonable. We all agree that it is a piano, and as such is capable of being played to make music. What, specifically, were you hoping for here?
Agreed. My guess is they didn't really do anything different internally. Aside from speaking subjectively about stuff like its particular timbre which may be affected by the type of wood used, but wouldn't be that insightful to just read IMO, there's not much else to mention aside from cosmetics.
Pretty much. They could have replaced all of the text with: "Piano, now with 5000% more bling. Because 600,000th." and then added like 50 more pictures to the page. That would have been ok in my book. Perhaps I spend too much time on Reddit.
The general "design" of a piano hasn't changed too much in over 300 years. And from a company that is known for making some of the best pianos, selling the way the piano sounds isn't much use. I remember a while back someone made a clear piano. I thought it was dumb, but how else are they going to differentiate? They can't make them easier to play (without adding player piano components) or increase the resolution of the sound.
Its sad to see that the piano is dying culturally. If i believe a dealer I met just 6 months ago, Steinway makes less than 500 a year. Its a dying form and its going the way of the dodo bird.
Or is it that the completely-analog piano has become more niche? Digital pianos these days sound and feel fantastic when put up against their analog counterparts in the lower end of the price range (what you'd find in a typical home). And they require zero maintenance and can be moved with ease. There will always be a place for a "real" piano, but you no longer need one if you just want to learn and play. I personally have a digital stage piano. It's 20 lbs. without the stand, and I can sling it over my shoulder with ease. 9 times out of 10, when I try to play a piano in someone's home it's out of tune and has some sticky or unplayable keys. So I'd say that analog pianos aren't dying, but they have become relegated to the niche of people who either want them as furniture or people who are serious enough to maintain and care for them. For the rest of us, digital is the right choice.
One must have a very poor set of ears if is unable to detect the difference between those hi-end digital honky tonk pianos and the niche piece of furniture I have in the living room.
Maybe it's just that I can buy a top-of-the line yamaha motif that plays really well, can be carried to gigs, has dozens of other functions, and (most importantly) never needs tuning, all for fraction of the cost has something to do with that number?
I've owned several pianos... I won't again, if I can avoid it. Just keeping an instrument in tune is enough of a problem: there is one tuner in my area who can get the thing in tune, and I don't like how he does his intonation.
I understand that piano production is way down from the early 20th century, but it's not like there aren't other instruments which have replaced it.
And, further, unlike instruments like the Fender Rhodes piano or the Hammond tone-wheel organs, these things are both still being produced and will in demand for the foreseeable future.
I also play pedal steel, and it is a similar situation: they make a lot fewer instruments these days because there are a lot of alternatives, but there is still more demand than output.
Are you kidding? Probably about 1 in 3 people I know has taken piano lessons before, and about 1 in 10 people I know practices regularly, if I were to guess.
On the other hand I can understand why sales of pianos are dying. Young people these days are increasingly living in shared apartments, multi-family spaces with poor sound isolation, and constantly on the move around the world and needing to live light. Most people who practice solve the problem either with an electric piano or visiting a communal piano at a nearby school, university or elsewhere. Those communal pianos, if maintained well, tend to last several decades.
It's 2,000 grand pianos / yr, 500 upright pianos / yr. 149. Around 1,000 grand pianos and 250 upright pianos are produced per year in the New York Factory. The Hamburg Steinway Factory produces a similar number of instruments.
It depends on how much it's played. A Steinway in your home is likely to last a lifetime or more. The Steinway in the recital hall at our school is between 20 and 30 years old (I think), and well past its prime. It's played (hard) probably 4-6 hours a day, and eventually they just wear out. It would make a fine piano for someone's house, but it's no longer a performance-quality instrument. (Our own personal piano is a pre-WWII instrument, a 5'9" Knabe with ivory keys. It's been rebuilt once, and is a little...quirky, and could probably do with another rebuilding. It was also a very good deal for two just-out-of-grad-school musicians.)
Some music schools have contracts with Steinway where they get all-new instruments every year, which are sold back to Steinway at the end of the year who sells them as used instruments. I'd imagine (but have no evidence) that music schools in general are one of the largest consumers of pianos. At our undergrad institution of ~200 majors, we have probably 30-40 pianos in the building. My graduate school probably had upwards of 200, and employed 3 full-time piano technicians to maintain them.
My gf's Steinway is nearly a hundred years old. If they're refurbished every 30-40 years or so and kept in conditions that make sure the frame/case don't warp or crack, they can last indefinitely.
It's relatively trivial to do a minor refurb to replace and realign hammers/felts, rather more expensive to replace the tunings pegs and strings, quite a big deal to do all the above and replace the soundboard too.
Gf's instrument is getting near to needing a complete rebuild, which we're estimating will cost around £6k and take a few months.
I can appreciate the interest in digital instruments, but nothing sounds close to the sonic richness, weight, projection, and detail of the real thing. You certainly can't play classical piano music on a sampled keyboard and have it fill a concert hall the way you can with a Steinway Model D.
The same thing has happened with pipe organs. There, the cost of a physical instrument is much larger—modest instruments are well over six figures, with many instruments reaching $1 million. Digital organs have found a place in many venues—especially those, such as concert halls, that only use them infrequently. However, there is still a thriving community of builders churning out new pipe organs, and a bank of speakers still can't match the power of thousands of individual pipes.
I saw an organ in the Netherlands that dates to the 1700's, and has been played by many legendary composers (including Haydn and Mozart, IIRC). While it's obviously seen continuous maintenance, it's still playable and used for performances today.
Growing up, I had a 150 year old upright (I forgot the make). It had a great sound, but a bad move between homes cracked a major support in it and it would have cost more to restore it than to buy a new one.
My parents finally sold it to a tuner for scrap long after I moved out.
In high school I was an exchange student and had a chance to play on a late 19th century "grand" style piano forte that was still in perfect working order and seemed like it would be good to go for quite a while. It didn't sound quite a nice or bright as a modern piano and had a smaller keyboard, but it worked well enough.
This process has been going on for over a century. Ever since the introduction of the phonograph, the social importance of sharing music around a piano has been in significant decline.
I'm not sure I agree entirely with this. Historically, pianos haven't been widely owned, and performances haven't been widely attended. Although I would guess ownership is probably more evenly distributed now than ever before (especially considering high quality digital pianos).
Piano (orchestra in general) does seem to infiltrate common culture fairly pervasively (at least american) through movies. Maybe it could even be argued that it's more culturally prevalent, but just less prominent.
I agree. I love piano music and large concert halls. A bit of a non-sequitur I love this piano video of Benjamin Grosvenor playing with David Gray interrupting:
I would love to have a piano-like instrument again, I just don't want to maintain a real piano anymore. Dating myself, I'd rather have an Ensoniq ASR-88 as the keyboard interface and soft-synths on a computer actually generating the audio.
I have no evidence, but that figure of 500/year can't possibly be correct. Maybe 500 of their largest, concert hall-size grand pianos, but not their entire line.
