Spinet - Spinets As Pianos

Spinets As Pianos

The spinet piano, manufactured from the 1930s until recent times, was the culmination of a trend among manufacturers to make pianos smaller and cheaper. It served the purpose of making pianos available for a low price, for owners who had little space for a piano. Many spinet pianos still exist today, left over from their period of manufacture.

The defining characteristic of the spinet was its drop action (sometimes called indirect blow action). In this device, the keys did not engage the action directly; rather they pulled upward on rods called "stickers," which in turn pulled upward on levers located below the level of the keyboard, which in turn engaged the action. The stickers were sufficiently long that the hammer heads (the highest part of the action) ended up at roughly the same vertical level as the keyboard.

Thanks to the drop action, spinet pianos could be made very small; the top of a spinet rose only a few inches above the level of the keyboard itself. However, according to piano author Larry Fine, the cost in quality was considerable. The stickers were "often noisy and troublesome." Moreover, to make room for them, the keys had to be made shorter, resulting in "very poor leverage" and thus a poor sense of touch and control for the player. Lastly, the very short strings of the spinet resulted in a narrow range of harmonics and thus in poor tone quality.

The spinet was also the bane of piano technicians. Concerning the difficulty of servicing them, Fine writes, "Spinets ... are very difficult to service because even the smallest repair requiring removal of the action becomes a major ordeal. Each of the connecting stickers has to be disconnected and tied up to the action and all the keys have to be removed from the piano before the action can be lifted out."