Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Any info about Gibeson Bros?

I have an old Gibeson Bros. (New York) Cabinet Piano. I know nothing about this thing, other than it is rather old. Does anyone have some info they can give me about this kind of piano?

Seems to have been a stencil name that someone put on a piano of unknown origin.

Possibly, but I don't think so. It is very old, from what I was told. Here is a picture of the front...


Any info would be helpful.

That is all the information the Piano Atlas has for Gibeson borthers. Just a star, which means "stencil" label in most cases. No other info.

Stencils are not necessarily bad, it just means that they made the piano for someone else - perhaps a music store or a department store. More important than the label is what sort of shape it's in.

Howz she play?

Well, I don't play piano, so it is kind of hard to say. It is an old player piano, but the player mechanism is not present. From what I ahve been told, it plays fine. It needs a little restoration, but nothing major, from what I can tell. It hasn't been tuned in many years, though. Here is another shot of just the keys.

Depending on what you intend to do with it, a call to a piano technician is in order. You want to tune it for sure - if for no other reason than to find out whether or not it CAN be tuned. If it will not take a tuning, it's probably (alas!) toast. If it holds a tune, you might have yourself a piano to learn on.

Have the technician look it over generally at the same time. He/she can give you a good idea of what it is you have to work with.

Nice camera work BTW...

Edge guy,

Just so you know, a "stencil piano" as termed in this thread has a specific meaning. They were American pianos from the early 1900s with made-up names and no marks inside the piano that would lead to identification of the real manufacturer.

Often the names used were near-misses to more famous names, like Gibeson instead of Gibson or Stineway instead of Steinway. Or just something as German sounding as possible. I guess the theory here is that People Are Dumb and if the name sounds kind of familiar, they figure the piano must be alright.

Basically, they were marketed to people who were just looking for the cheapest price they could find on a new piano. A known manufacturer who actually built it might not want it's name associated with with such a cheap piano and/or did not want anyone coming after them looking for warranty service, because at the prices they sold for, they could not afford to factor in the possibility of warranty work.

Today there are still a lot of pianos built with made-up names put on the fallboard, but now most of the time the factory that builds them is known and there is a warranty. These too are often called "stencil pianos", but it's not the same thing as those olde American uprights with manufacturer unknown.

Regards,

Rick Clark

Thanks a lot for all the info!