Words by Christian Henson

Whilst I knew the piano was a complicated instrument, I didn’t quite believe how mind-blowing my trip to Schimmel would be. How do they make pianos? How did these monumentally complex bits of machinery become the ‘king’ instrument? I guess the scale of complexity was only eclipsed by the fact that a piano is a bit of a Frankenstein instrument made up of three distinctly independent component parts.

I won’t try to give a history lesson here, nor will I simply copy something out of Wikipedia by someone a lot more learned than me - I’ll just try to explain what goes into making a piano, as far as I can make out as a result of the visit.

*From our Archive.

Schimmel Pianos