The changing face of the Piano Trade

It is lamentable that the Piano Manufacturing Industry in England - once so enviable and influential, has all but disappeared without trace. Back in the 1970s, noticing the first few imported pianos from unfamiliar makers, one could sense that change was in the air. Complacency in any industry is a bad policy. Once decline sets in and the momentum gathers pace, the outcome is depressing.

Seeing a Yamaha piano for the first time was like seeing a 'cloud the size of a man's hand' - a cloud that in no time at all, filled the heavens and brought a great deluge of rain! The first batches of Yamaha pianos delivered to the local piano shop created astonishment. It was clear the Japanese piano was going to be a threat to the market dominance enjoyed for so long by the English piano. How was it that a piano made in Japan could be sold for just a little more than a piano made in the UK? 

The best British pianos seemed to be rather average compared to the imported pianos that soon dominated that new-piano-market. One by one, the English manufacturers ceased production so that in a few decades, we saw the total loss of an industry. Alas for the English Piano!

The more recent economic downturn has added further woes and bad news to Piano shops up and down the country. Pianos are regarded as a luxury item - and are one of the first items of expenditure to be delayed or postponed entirely. 

Where will all this take us? Only the 'fittest' of piano shops will survive, and it will take a few years of successful trading to put a smile back on the face of the piano trade. 

Buying and selling pianos on eBay may turn out to be the method of choice for bargain hunters  - but there are plenty of dangers to be met with here. Off-loading an awful piano is quite easy if you can produce a few good photos! Auction Houses have, for a very long time, been selling what other people no longer want. Maybe, ebay will be able to preserve a strong, residual demand for the good old-fashoned, traditional piano! However, buying online is quite a gamble when there can be no substitute for sitting at the piano itself - to hear it, feel it and to try to answer the question: Do I like this piano enough to buy it?

Tuner's Journal

© Steve Burden

How Often a Piano Needs to be Tuned

Music demands that a piano should be in tune. Regular tuning is the most reliable way to keep a piano in stable tune. However frequently the piano is tuned, the tuning is never static - the weather, temperature and humidity all affect the tuning. This is the same for fine quality pianos and the not so very good ones. In different sections of the piano - the middle, treble and bass - the tuning can move about unevenly. 

Piano tuning is an ongoing battle with the conditions in which a piano is kept. The pianist who has a keen ear and the concert pianist who demands perfection, both expect the piano tuner to have the piano in tune whatever the weather. Achieving this golden goal can be done only by a period of over-tuning the piano. Only when a degree of tuning stability is established, can the time between tunings can be lengthened.

One thing is certain: if while tuning a piano, the pitch has been raised, say, half a semitone, it will take a while for the piano to settle nicely in tune at that higher pitch. So it is quite possible to have a piano tuned, only to find that all too quickly, it loses that recently-tuned sound. This is not the fault of the tuner! 

From the tuner's point of view, a change in pitch is always countered by the stretch of the strings. Altering the pitch of a piano is like pushing something heavy up a slope. Even when the tuner thinks the pitch of the strings are going to stay where he put it, a force - like the downward pull of gravity, fights back as if it would prefer the tuning to go back where it was! 

It is a mistake to think that because the piano was tuned last week, last month, last year or 2 years ago, it will not need tuning again. As a general rule, a piano should be tuned about twice a year and definitely not left longer than a year. If you have a keen ear, you may find the piano needs to be tuned 3 times a year! 

Tuner's Journal

© Steve Burden