BIOGRAPHY
Del Fandrich
Delwin D. Fandrich, piano designer and builder, has been actively involved in the piano industry since the early 1960s. He began as a piano technician doing basic piano servicing, and over time he grew his business into a major piano rebuilding facility. He has been an active member of the Piano Technicians Guild since 1972.
Fandrich worked as service manager for Oregon’s largest Steinway dealer and continued as the official piano tuner for the Oregon Symphony Orchestra. Increasingly dissatisfied with the performance of new pianos, he began studying piano design and manufacturing techniques, ultimately becoming Director of Piano Research and Development for the Baldwin Piano & Organ Company.
In 1989 he made another career shift, becoming at the time America’s only independent design and manufacturing consultant. His first project was to design and build a 190 cm (6’ 3”) grand piano for the Charles Walter Piano Company, followed by assisting the company in setting up their first grand piano manufacturing facility. Ten years later he designed the Walter 175 cm (5’ 9”) grand piano.
During the early 1990s he designed and manufactured the 122 cm (48”) Fandrich Vertical Piano, which was labeled “revolutionary” by Larry Fine in The Piano Book, third edition. Utilizing his patented soundboard system (U.S. Patent #5320018), this piano has been called one of the best vertical pianos of its size ever built. A CNN video of this factory can be seen on www.YouTube.com.
During 2008–13 Fandrich worked with Young Chang redesigning their entire product line and refining their manufacturing systems to improve build quality and performance consistency. Most of these new designs are now available in the United States and Canada.
Fandrich has written extensively on the subjects of piano design, manufacture, and acoustics. He authored a long-running series of articles for the Piano Technicians Journal, “The Designer’s Notebook,” that explained piano technology for the technician from a designer’s perspective. Fandrich also updated and republished the historic book, Piano Tone Building, adding numerous footnotes and comments, correcting errors, and bringing the work up to date. More recently he contributed to the book “An Introduction to Spectral Analysis of Musical Sounds” by David M. Koenig (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Fandrich lectures extensively on piano technology and design topics in the U.S., Europe, Australia, Korea, and China. In addition to his factory consulting work he maintains several active research projects in his workshop in Olympia, Washington.