When Richard talks about using a CNC machine, increasing production by 400%, and banging out a keyboard a week, you might get the impression that you’d walk into his shop and see three guys smoking a cigarette, watching a CNC carve out a $10 thousand dollar keyboard.

Being one of the last people in his profession, Richard believes that incorporating new technology into his craft is the way to keep moving forward.

“Do you get any blowback from traditionalist from using things like carbon fiber and CNC?” I ask.

“Well, one of the benefits of being the only guy who does something is that nobody can complain,” he says with a chuckle.

“I think, initially, when I first started going on Internet forums and showing off my work, especially on the global piano technicians forum and things like that, then some of the guys, old-school guys, would look at it and be like—they didn’t understand. They think, oh, you just take a piece of wood, throw it on a machine, and oh, look, I got a keyboard. It’s like no. The CNC machine can only do about 30% of the work. The rest is still done by hand.”

I ask, “ So, starting off tuning pianos, rebuilding the whole thing, and now, going into a more specialized part of that, how does your experience doing all of it, doing the grunt work—how does that make you better at what you do now?”

Well, I’ll tell you, people ask me, all of the time, how I figured out how to do a lot of this stuff. The real trick was a lot of trial and error, and doing it yourself, and trying to get it right. There is no substitute. Even using the CNC, and getting into CAD and CAM and laser cutting, and all that kinda stuff, for this work, if you can’t do it the old way—if I didn’t learn how to do it the old way, without all that stuff, and with that basically Victorian element (with electricity, essentially), I would never be able to do what I do now. “

“I would imagine that you’re able to understand everything in a deeper way, because you’ve had to build everything in a very basic, functional way.”

“Yeah, you’ve built it from the ground up.”

“Tell me about the carbon fiber thing.” I say.

When I first walked into Richard's shop, lying on a table was the frame of a keyboard...made from carbon fiber.