Private | |
Industry | Musical instruments |
---|---|
Founded | 1857; 163 years ago |
Founder | Dwight Hamilton Baldwin |
Headquarters | Trumann, Arkansas[1] , |
Key people | James Curleigh (President & CEO) |
Products | Pianos |
Subsidiaries | Wurlitzer |
Website | baldwinpiano.com |
The Baldwin Piano Company is an American piano brand. It was once the largest US-based manufacturer of keyboard instruments and known by the slogan, 'America's Favorite Piano'. It ceased most domestic production in December 2008, moving its total production to China. A former subsidiary of Gibson,[3] Baldwin is one of the top 10 largest American manufacturers of musical instruments. Current pianos only display the 'Baldwin' name and brand with all of the formerly American made upright models being made in Baldwin's Chinese factory.[4][5]
History[edit]
The company traces its origins back to 1857, when Dwight Hamilton Baldwin began teaching piano, organ, and violin in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1862, Baldwin started a Decker Brothers piano dealership and, in 1866, hired Lucien Wulsin as a clerk. Wulsin became a partner in the dealership, by then known as D.H. Baldwin & Company, in 1873, and, under his leadership, the Baldwin Company became the largest piano dealer in the Midwestern United States by the 1890s.
In 1889–1890, Baldwin vowed to build 'the best piano that could be built'[6] and subsequently formed two production companies: Hamilton Organ, which built reed organs, and the Baldwin Piano Company, which made pianos. The company's first piano, an upright, began selling in 1891. The company introduced its first grand piano in 1895.
Jump to Baldwin - This was a comprehensive 2-manual and 32-note pedalboard instrument and was mechanically similar to a medium-sized. Baldwin theatre organs were found as both spinets and consoles. Baldwin Studio II organ. User Manual, Owner's Manual, Manuale Utente, Manual de Usuario, Anleitung Bedienungsanleitung, User Guide, Guide de l'Utilisateur, Owners Manual, Istruzioni Uso.
A 1905 Baldwin ad.
A Baldwin Hamilton manufactured in 1968.
Baldwin died in 1899 and left the vast majority of his estate to fund missionary causes. Wulsin ultimately purchased Baldwin's estate and continued the company's shift from retail to manufacturing. The company won its first major award in 1900, when their model 112 won the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the first American manufactured piano to win such an award. Baldwin-manufactured pianos also won top awards at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and the 1914 Anglo-American Exposition. By 1913, business had become brisk, with Baldwin exporting to thirty-two countries in addition to having retailers throughout the United States.
Baldwin, like many other manufacturers, began building player pianos in the 1920s. A piano factory was constructed in Cincinnati, Ohio. The models became unpopular by the end of the 1920s, which, coupled with the beginning of the Great Depression, could have spelled disaster for Baldwin. However, the company's president, Lucien Wulsin II, had created a large reserve fund for such situations, and Baldwin was able to ride out the market downturn.
During World War II, the US War Production Board ordered the cessation of all US piano manufacturing so that the factories could be used for the US war effort. Baldwin factories were used to manufacture plywood airplane components for various aircraft such as the Aeronca PT-23 trainer and the stillborn Curtiss-Wright C-76 Caravan cargo aircraft. While the employment of wood components in military aircraft could by no means be considered a resounding success, lessons learned in constructing plywood aircraft wings ultimately assisted in Baldwin's development of its 21-ply maple pinblock design used in its postwar piano models.
![Organ Organ](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125844493/639196745.jpg)
After the war ended, Baldwin resumed selling pianos, and by 1953 the company had doubled production figures from prewar levels. In 1946, Baldwin introduced its first electronic organ (developed in 1941),[7] which became so successful that the company changed its name to the Baldwin Piano & Organ Company. In 1961, Lucien Wulsin III became president. By 1963, the company had acquired C. Bechstein Pianofortefabrik and remained its owner until 1986. In 1959, Baldwin constructed a new piano manufacturing plant in Conway, Arkansas, originally to manufacture upright pianos: by 1973, the company had built 1,000,000 upright pianos. In 1961 Baldwin constructed a new piano factory in Greenwood Mississippi. Subsequently production of upright pianos was moved from Cincinnati, Ohio to Greenwood.
The company next attempted to capitalize on the growth of pop music. After an unsuccessful bid to buy Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, Baldwin bought Burns of London in 1965 for $380,000, and began selling the guitars through the company's piano retail outlets. During this time period, Baldwin engineer Robert C. Scherer developed the Prismatone pickup for nylon string guitars.[8] Unaccustomed to marketing guitars, the Baldwin stores failed to interest many guitar buyers, and sales proved disappointing.[9] In 1967, Baldwin also bought Gretsch guitars, which had its own experienced guitar sales force and a distribution network of authorized retail outlets. However, Fender and Gibson continued to dominate, and sales did not reach expected levels. The Gretsch guitar operation was sold back to the Gretsch family in 1989.
Throughout the 1970s, the company undertook a significant bid to diversify into financial services. Under the leadership of Morley P. Thompson, Baldwin bought dozens of firms and by the early 1980s owned over 200 savings and loan institutions, insurance companies and investment firms, including MGIC Investment Corporation. The company changed its name to Baldwin-United in 1977 after a merger with United Corp.[10] In 1980, the company opened a new piano manufacturing facility in Trumann, Arkansas.[11] By 1982, however, the piano business contributed only three percent of Baldwin's $3.6 billion revenues. Meanwhile, the company had taken on significant debt to finance its acquisitions and new facilities, and was finding it increasingly difficult to meet its loan obligations. In 1983, the holding company and several of its subsidiaries were forced into bankruptcy with a total debt of over $9 billion—at that time, the largest bankruptcy ever. However, the piano business was not part of the bankruptcy.[12]
During bankruptcy proceedings in 1984, the Baldwin piano business was sold to its management.[13] The new company went public in 1986 as the Baldwin Piano and Organ Company[14] and moved its headquarters to Loveland, Ohio.[15]
However, difficulties continued as demographic changes and foreign competition slowed sales of keyboard instruments. The company responded by acquiring Wurlitzer to increase market share and by moving manufacturing overseas to reduce production costs.[16] In 1998, the company moved its headquarters from Loveland to nearby Deerfield Township.[15][17] Throughout the 1990s, the company's fortunes improved, and by 1998, the company's 270 employees at its Conway, Arkansas facility were building 2,200 grand pianos a year. However, in 2001, Baldwin was again facing difficulties, and filed for bankruptcy once again, when the company was bought by Gibson Guitar Corporation.[18] In 2005, the company laid off some workers from its Trumann, Arkansas manufacturing plant while undergoing restructuring.[11]
The company, now a subsidiary of Gibson Guitar Corporation, has manufactured instruments under the Baldwin, Chickering, Wurlitzer, Hamilton, and Howard names. Baldwin has bought two piano factories in China in which they are manufacturing grand and vertical pianos. Recreations of the former US built verticals are built at its factory in Zhongshan, China. These include the Baldwin Hamilton studio models B243 and B247 which are the most popular school pianos ever built.[19] The much larger factory in Dongbei is not building pianos at this time. Baldwin grand pianos are being built to Baldwin specification by Parsons Music, China.[1] All new pianos are being sold under the Baldwin name and not Wurlitzer, Hamilton or Chickering.[19]
Baldwin stopped manufacturing new pianos at its Trumann, Arkansas factory in December, 2008. They retained a small staff to build custom grands and to finish numerous artist grands which are ordered.[5] As of October, 2018 the factory in Trumann, AR has been closed and remaining inventory disposed of[20]..
Notable performers[edit]
Evanescence's Amy Lee performing in 2011
Many distinguished musicians have chosen to compose, perform and record using Baldwin pianos, including the pianists Walter Gieseking, Claudio Arrau, Jorge Bolet, Morton Estrin, Margaret Baxtresser (née Barthel), Earl Wild and José Iturbi and the composers Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, André Previn, and John Williams. Baldwin pianos have been used by popular entertainers including Ray Charles, Liberace, Richard Carpenter, Michael Feinstein, Billy Joel, Cat Stevens, and Carly Simon, and jazz pianists Dave Brubeck, George Shearing and Dick Hyman. Amy Lee, the lead vocalist, pianist and keyboardist of Evanescence also uses this brand in most of her compositions, recordings and live performances. A Baldwin piano was seen nightly being played by Paul Shaffer on the Late Show with David Letterman. Baldwin was the official piano of the television show Glee. Marian McPartland's long-running radio show Piano Jazz was hosted by Baldwin.[21] Baldwin was second only to Steinway in its artist and symphony roster.
See also[edit]
- Moody Amplifiers, the Australian importer of Baldwin pianos in the 1970s
Bibliography[edit]
- Crombie, David. Piano: Evolution, Design, and Performance. Barnes and Noble, 2000. First printed by Balafon Books, Great Britain, 1995. (ISBN0-7607-2026-6)
- Baldwin Piano & Organ CompanyEncyclopedia of Company Histories. Answers.com. Accessed March 1, 2007.
References[edit]
- ^The Baldwin Story at Taylor Music.com
- ^For distribution. Baldwin pianos are manufactured in China.
- ^La marca de guitarras Gibson se declara en bancarrota by Oscar Adame on Warp.la, 20 Feb 2018
- ^http://www.musictrades.com/top100.html
- ^ ab'Baldwin ceases production, lays off workers'. Trumann Democrat. December 8, 2008. Archived from the original on 2012-03-19. Retrieved 2009-02-11.
- ^'Baldwin Pianos'. Baldwin Piano. Retrieved 2014-03-11.
- ^Hans-Joachim Braun (1982). 'Music Engineers. The Remarkable Career of Winston E. Kock, Electronic Organ Designer and NASA Chief of Electronics'(PDF). CHE2004 of IEEE.Cite journal requires
|journal=
(help) - ^'Robert C. Scherer Prismatone inventor'. Retrieved 2014-11-14.
- ^Gjörde, Per (2001). Pearls and Crazy Diamonds. Göteborg, Sweden: Addit Information AB. pp. 35–37.
- ^Baldwin Piano & Organ Company History fundinguniverse.com
- ^ abKAIT8 News, Jan. 7, 2005, 'Trumann Piano Plant Lays Off Workers While Undergoing Restructuring'Archived 2009-02-21 at the Wayback Machine,
- ^Baldwin, A Casualty Of Fast Expansion, Files For Bankruptcy New York Times September 27, 1983
- ^'G.E. Credit Signs Deal With Baldwin'. The New York Times. June 19, 1984. Retrieved 2007-12-17.
- ^Rothstein, Eward (September 27, 1987). 'For the Piano, Chords of Change'. The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-12-15.
- ^ abOsborne, William (2004). Music in Ohio. Kent State University Press. p. 492. ISBN0-87338-775-9 – via Google Books.
In November 1998 its headquarters had been relocated a bit further north in suburbia, abandoning the location in Loveland it had occupied since 1986 in favor of an office park in Deerfield Township.
- ^'COMPANY NEWS; Wurlitzer Sale To Baldwin'. The New York Times (Reuters). The New York Times Company. 1987-12-24. Retrieved 2008-10-25.
- ^'Baldwin to move headquarters'. Cincinnati Business Courier. American City Business Journals. August 24, 1998. Retrieved April 1, 2018.
- ^'Gibson Guitar to Buy Baldwin Piano'. Los Angeles Times. Tribune Company. 2001-11-02. p. C2. Retrieved 2008-10-25.
- ^ abFine, Larry (2016). Acoustic and Digital Piano Buyer. Brookside Press. p. 168. ISBN978-192914543-0. Archived from the original on 2016-11-29. Retrieved 2017-01-08.
- ^Jean-Pierre Thiollet, 88 notes pour piano solo, Neva Editions, 2015, p.135. ISBN978-2-3505-5192-0
- ^'Marian McPartland's Storied Life, Told 'In Good Time''. Weekend Edition. August 17, 2012. 10:58 minutes in. NPR.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Baldwin Piano Company. |
- Morley Thompson Interview NAMM Oral History Library (2003)
- Lucien Wulsin Interview NAMM Oral History Library (2005)
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Baldwin_Piano_Company&oldid=925138338'
The warm sounds of 1960s electronic 'combo' organs from makers like Vox, Farfisa, Ace Tone, Yamaha, Elka, and more have been heard in popular music for more than 50 years.
Though the majority of vintage organs that exist today have their share of issues, as some of the first fully electronic instruments ever made, they are also some of the simplest. You tend to find that most suffer from the same types of problems. In fact, probably around two-thirds of the combo organ problems I fix at my repair shop Bell Tone Synth Works fall into a few main categories, and they are things that anyone who knows how to solder could fix at home.
This makes combo organs a great place to start if you’re interested in learning more about the 'guts' of electronic instruments or getting into restoring vintage gear. Once you learn how to handle these issues, you’ll be ready for many of the problems that can crop up in a currently working organ and be on your way to being able to restore a non-working organ to its former glory.
Tools And Supplies
Because organs are so simple, you don’t need many fancy tools or supplies to work on them. Here are the basics.
Contact cleaner: Get a product labeled 'electrical contact cleaner' or 'electronic contact cleaner' that does not contain added lubricant.
DeOxit D100: This 'contact conditioner' is expensive and leaves an oily residue, so I use it sparingly, but for those occasions when contact cleaner alone doesn’t quite cut it, it’s a big help. However, this isn’t an essential item.
Soldering Iron: A decent, temperature-controlled soldering station makes a huge difference. You can get pretty good one for as little as $40–$50.
Solder: It is necessary to use lead-based solder when working on vintage electronics. A lead/tin 60/40 blend with a rosin core and a moderate gauge (.062') works well.
Desoldering tool: I use a powered vacuum desoldering station in my workshop, but before I shelled out the cash for that, I was pretty happily using desoldering wick for all my desoldering. 'Solder sucker' hand pumps can suck up more solder more quickly, but can be messy.
It might be worth getting both (they’re both inexpensive) and seeing which you prefer. You can also use them in combination. When removing components from vintage organs’ rather crude circuit boards, you can also often simply pull a component out with pliers while heating its solder with your regular soldering iron.
Audio Signal Tracer: When working on organs specifically, I probably use this more than my multimeter and almost never need to use my oscilloscope. You can buy one or make one by taking a ¼' mono cable, cutting one end off, and then soldering one alligator clip to the shield (ground) and one to the 'hot' wire.
You can use it to 'listen in' on your audio signal path in any piece of electronic gear. But be aware—these signals can be much hotter than line level, so if you’re using a homemade signal tracer with no resistance like this, keep your amp turned down very low. It’s good to have a multimeter too.
Homemade Audio Signal Tracer
Hand tools: Small pliers with wire cutter or, preferably, small pliers and separate diagonal cutting pliers. Flathead and Philips-head screwdrivers, average size (#2).
Schematics: You can most likely find the service manual or schematic for your organ for free online. I suggest trying to follow along with it as much as you can as you work on your organ, even if you don’t yet understand most of it.
Vacuum: Once you open up the top of the organ, you’ll probably find that it’s very dirty inside. Feel free to go ahead and vacuum it out as much as you can with a vacuum cleaner’s brush extension. Your organ can handle it.
Also, don’t forget to make sure the organ is unplugged while you’re working on it!
Dirty Switches
The first problem you’re likely to encounter on a vintage combo organ is dirty rocker switches. Sometimes you’ll hear a ton of crackly, crunchy noise when you change the position of a switch, or sometimes, it’ll be so dirty that it will seem to not work at all—you’ll turn a sound setting on and hear no change.
The solution to this is simple once you take apart the organ to the point that you can access the back or underside of the switches. You’ll see that the back of every rocker switch involves many contact tabs, wires, and springs.
Take your contact cleaner and spray a generous amount into the 'guts' of each switch, then switch the rocker switch back and forth 20 to 30 times, turn the organ back on and check the switches for noise, and repeat as needed. If no amount of cleaning stops the crackling, suspect a cold or loose solder joint somewhere. If a switch still seems to do nothing, suspect a more serious circuit-level problem.
Key Contact Problems
Key contacts are bare metal wires that carry each note signal to horizontal rods acting as passive mixer busses ('buss bars') when you press the key. The mixes on these buss bars then travel to fixed-frequency filters that create the different tone settings.
Plug the 1/4' plug end of your signal tracer into an amp, connect the shield/ground side of your probing end to the metal frame of your organ, and touch a key contact with the tip side. You should be able to hear that note being carried on the key contact.
Dirty key contacts show up as crackling or whooshing noises when you press certain keys. Some keys may work only intermittently, some won’t work at all, or some will work only on certain settings. To address this, you’ll have to continue taking apart your organ until you can access the key contacts, which are underneath or behind the keys.
If possible, you’ll want to clean both the key contacts and the buss bars, but depending on the design of the organ, this can be tricky.
The basic procedure, like with the switches, is to blast the key contact and rod with contact cleaner and work the key up and down many times.
Cleaning key contacts
Many organs have many rows of key contacts for different footages, some of which are very difficult to access. In these cases, the best you can do is just keep on shooting contact cleaner in and working the keys, escalating to using Deoxit D100 spray if necessary.
On some organs, you can actually unscrew and carefully slide out the buss bars. If you can, take this opportunity to clean them thoroughly with metal polish. Rubbing them with a soft rubber eraser can also often remove a lot of the tarnish.
Bad Oscillators and Dividers
In a combo organ, each of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale typically has its own small circuit board, often referred to as a 'tone generator' and labeled with its note name.
The first circuit on each tone generator board is a simple oscillator with a large inductor coil that you can turn with a screwdriver to tune.
This oscillator produces the highest octave of that note on the keyboard, which is then fed to a series of identical, simple frequency divider circuits. Each of these 'octave dividers' divides the frequency of the input signal by two to produce a tone an octave lower.
Four small octave divider boards sit atop each oscillator board on this Noble Porto Organ
The output of each octave divider is fed to the corresponding key contact and also to the input of the next divider to generate all the octaves of that note needed on the organ.
The repetitive circuitry of the tone generators makes it fairly simple to pinpoint which part of which board is bad if you have notes that aren’t working. If none of a certain note work, you can usually assume that that note’s oscillator is bad. If the top octave or top few octaves of a note work but the lower ones don’t, it’s because you have a bad octave divider.
Since each octave of a note is created directly from the note one octave higher, a single bad octave divider will mean none of the successive lower octaves will work correctly.
Often, the note will pass through a bad octave divider and just not get divided, resulting in keys that produce the wrong octave of their note. Sometimes, lower octaves of a certain note won’t make any sound at all, or their tone will sound buzzy or otherwise mangled. Luckily, there are two main things that cause tone generator circuits to fail the vast majority of the time.
The first thing is the failure of the electrolytic capacitors on the tone generator boards.
A capacitor is a component that temporarily stores electricity (voltage). Electrolytic capacitors are made like batteries, with layers of paper soaked in electrolyte solution. They inevitably fail over the decades as this solution dries up or leaks out. Old electrolytic capacitors typically look like small metal cans and can be either silver or colored.
Assorted electrolytic capacitors removed from organs.
If a part of the tone generator board (an oscillator or a certain octave divider) is bad, the first thing to do is replace all of the electrolytic capacitors in that circuit section. It’s not worth spending time trying to pinpoint exactly which capacitor is the problem because they only cost a few cents each and it’s better to replace more of them in the long run. In the shop, we actually replace all of the electrolytic capacitors in every organ.
Each capacitor is marked with its capacitance in microfarads (uf or μf) and its voltage rating (V), and you should replace it with one with the same or as close as possible capacitance (up to 20 percent higher or 10 percent lower is fine if you have to get a different value) and the same or higher voltage rating.
Before you remove each old capacitor, take note of which side is labeled with a '+' and '-' sign and put the new one in the same way, as electrolytic capacitors are polarized and can only accept incoming current in one direction.
Removing electrolytic capacitors from the oscillator section of a Farfisa tone generator board.
If replacing the capacitors in the offending circuit doesn’t fix the problem, you’ll progress to replacing transistors.
Although transistors on different organs can look very different from one another, they are easily recognizable. They have three leads (little wire 'legs' leading to the board) whereas all the other components you’ll find in an organ circuit just have two. They may look like little metal cans, or they may be black and cylindrical in shape. They could also look like a cylinder cut in half, sometimes with a rounded top.
These bipolar junction transistors can be used for either amplification or switching. On these tone generator boards, they are being used for their switching capabilities, forming audio waveforms as they switch on and off.
Each transistor will have an alphanumeric code on it that identifies what type it is (for example SFT 352, AF-116, or sometimes just a number). Though the obsolete transistors in vintage organs are always going to be out-of-production, you can often find a replacement by searching eBay or other sources that sell salvaged and surplus electronics. If not, other resources on the internet can help you choose a substitute.
Bad capacitors and transistors are also likely causes of problems that you may have in other areas of your organ, like vibrato, tremolo, percussion, and preamp circuits.
An Old Gear Restoration Best Practice: Power Supply Re-cap
There’s one more thing I strongly recommend taking care of if you’re already taking a soldering iron to your vintage organ, and that is replacing the large electrolytic capacitors in the power supply, surrounding the transformer.
These capacitors perform the vital task of making sure the circuits receive a clean and steady DC voltage. If they are old and weak (which they definitely are if they haven’t been replaced yet), it will make your organ noisier and continue to stress the circuits, hastening the failure of more components.
Replacing the power supply capacitors is really a best practice whenever you’re working on old gear. I consider it mandatory whenever I’m working on anything over 25 years old.
Other Weird Things Going on in Organs
While vintage organs are mostly very similar, each one has its own odd design features that can initially be a bit difficult to figure out. Some have tube preamps and reverb tanks. Some have optical (light-controlled) percussion envelope generators.
Some have 'slalom' pedals (Farfisa Fast series), filter sweep knee levers, pitch bend ribbon controllers (Yamaha YC series), or ring modulators.
8-Part of the percussion envelope circuitry in a Farfisa Compact Deluxe
It’s funny to imagine what it was like when they were being churned out by dozens of different companies when the organ world full of cutting-edge innovation and cutthroat competition, with every manufacturer trying to come up with a wacky new feature to set their organs apart.
The more organs you encounter, the more you’ll realize that all these gimmicks are just the same small handful of simple circuit types being combined in different ways.
One last tip—more than a few organs out there were designed to be played through two amps and thus have stereo output jacks that won’t mix down to a mono plug. So if you ever come across an organ in which either the bass section or the rest of the organ’s notes don’t seem to be working, you might just need a stereo-to-mono adapter.
![Studio Studio](http://www.essexorganmuseum.com/Organs/Eminent-2500.jpg)
Though the past few years have certainly brought renewed interest in all kinds of DIY pastimes, as well as analog technology, it also seems like the sophisticated and expensive electronics that surround us have made some people more intimidated than ever by the idea of working on electronics themselves.
If you want to learn more about analog electronics and restoring vintage gear, there’s no better way to start than by fixing up something that’s simple, cheap, and busted. Fifty years after the combo organ’s heyday, you won’t have trouble finding an organ that’s desperate for a little attention.
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