The truth is that all pianos are handmade. There is no other way to build them.

Specialists work on different parts of the piano during the manufacturing process. Each factory uses the best, most modern tools and machines available to them. The skills required to cast plates, season wood, fashion hammers, assemble actions and countless other processes are each unique. No one person can be really good at all of them, so it really does take a village to build a piano.

A Steinway & Sons piano requires about 300 hours of labor while the typical piano takes a fraction of that time. Budget pianos are built even faster. Steinway & Sons uses a rigorous apprentice program to insure their exacting methods are passed down from one generation of craftsmen to the next.

These videos show the similar methods between a Steinway built in the 1920’s versus the modern Steinway piano built today.