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Welcome back to the Merriam Pianos channel, today we have an extremely special look at a 100 year old vintage Knabe grand piano.


For regular viewers of the channel, you will know that vintage pianos are not a very common topic for us, and that isn't because we've got some grudge against vintage pianos, it's mostly just that I'm usually pretty musically underwhelmed by them. So I'm not often inspired to share them.


The simple truth is the vast majority of instruments decline musically over time. And although there are some aspects of the piano which can be resuscitated with sufficient time and investment, such as the action…once you start ripping the full guts out of the instrument I.E the belly or the soundboard, bridge and sometimes the pin block assembly, unless you're dealing with like a factory trained technician, or even sometimes a factory in the case of say Steinway rebuild, it's very difficult that you'll ever get back to the original kind of magic the piano once had.




So imagine my surprise when a couple weeks ago this piano wound up in our shop. It's a vintage Knabe. This is an American built, specifically built in Baltimore, 6 ftish grand piano. It's kind of a salon type size for a large home setting or maybe a small recital hall, and has what appears to be a full restoration done sometime in either the late 1990s or early 2000s. But most critically with the original soundboard preserved and I'm going to get to why that makes this instrument such an interesting find.


Now outside of the soundboard, everything on this instrument has been completely rebuilt. We're talking about a brand new PIN block, we're talking about New Bridge caps, a full Renner action and the original ivory keys.


Now the Knabe brand has a rich history and was considered one of the very best instruments being made in North America at the time, which given the context of what everybody else was building around the world at that moment, probably makes this one of the best pianos in the world. Some could argue it might have been a top 5 piano, but it's hands down definitely a top 10 piano for the moment in time when it was being built.


We suspect this example is either early 1910s or possibly early to mid1920 based on its musical features. However, due to the many restorations, the original serial number has been lost. But there's enough other telltale markers on here that at least allows us to pinpoint its original origin, the factory it came out of, and the general era that it was produced.


Now Knabe’s weren't just well known because of their quality, but they certainly were well known because of their quality. In fact, you can find a Knabe at Graceland, you can find one in the white house, and it is also still the official piano of the New York Metropolitan Opera.


There are very specific musical features on this piano. Of its day for one it has this really prominent front duplexing feature which is something that Steinway of course pushed to the back of the piano Knabe was really focused on getting this working at the front of the instrument so this is a very specifically tuned section of string from the Capo back to this raised brass section to give the instrument some extra higher resonance when you're playing instrument it also has three Bridges which is not completely unique to Knabe, but it is pretty rare that you have a tenor bridge, table bridge and bass bridge.


The result is a piano that has so much sustain and upper color that I had to get the audio spectrometer out just to see how many partials were happening, and would you believe there were 13 peaks! Most pianos have six, seven or eight. I've seen a couple that get up into maybe the 9th partial that can really be detected, but 13 completely distinct peaks on this Knabe, which really explains what my ears were hearing.


There's just so much soundboard tone coming at you, it's a blended sound so you don't get that super directional sense that you do off other instruments such as say a Bechstein, it's kind of just this wash of sound coming towards you, yet extremely colorful.