Yamaha U1

The Yamaha U1 is an upright piano, 121 centimetres high and a little over a metre and a half wide, made for the home, the practice room and the teaching studio. In its usual form the case is black polyester polished to a mirror, with the name Yamaha in gold on the fallboard, a plain music desk, square legs and three brass pedals. Inside, the strings run vertically across an iron frame in front of a spruce soundboard, and the hammers strike them from the front.

It belongs to the U series, which Nippon Gakki, as Yamaha was then called, began in 1954. Yamaha's own list of its uprights shows the U1 in three versions that first year, priced from 195,000 to 250,000 yen. The company had made pianos since 1900, but the U series came as it was turning itself into an industrial maker: in 1965 it opened a factory at Kakegawa for assembling uprights, and that year it became the largest piano maker in the world.

The model was revised again and again, each revision marked by a letter. The U1D followed in 1959, then the E, F and G, and in 1972 the U1H, which was made until 1980 and is the version most often found second-hand. In Japan its successors were renamed in 1987, first U10 and later YU, but abroad the piano kept the name U1, and the iron frame of a 1985 instrument still has the letters cast into it.

Today's U1 is made at Kakegawa and has acquired a fallboard that closes slowly and hammers of a newer design. It remains the same instrument: an upright of the same height and keyboard, built for the same rooms. Dealers still recondition and sell U1s from the 1970s beside the new ones, and the two are recognisably the same piano.