About piano.wiki

piano.wiki is a piano encyclopedia and serial-number dating archive. It currently holds 5,059 serial records across 150 manufacturers, and it is free, with no advertising and no accounts.

It is built and maintained by Grant Larcom, who also runs Savvy Pianist and Setlists.io.

Why it exists

Piano serial number data is scattered, inconsistent, and frequently wrong. The same chart gets copied between sites for decades, errors and all, and most tools will hand you a confident-looking year for a serial number that their own data does not actually cover. The goal here is narrower and duller: to be right, and to say so honestly when we can’t be.

How the data is handled

Records are compiled from published serial tables, manufacturer-published charts, and our own verification work. Every range is validated: the archive is checked automatically for overlapping ranges, inverted years and gaps, and a suite of regression cases — many of them spot-verified against manufacturers’ own lookup tools — runs against the whole database so a fixed error cannot quietly return.

Where the underlying source only supports a range, the site reports a range instead of inventing a year. Where a serial falls outside anything we hold, or predates the brand entirely, it refuses to answer rather than guessing. A wrong date confidently given is worse than no date.

When we’re wrong

Sometimes we are. Every result page has a link to report a correction, and evidence from the instrument itself — a dated bill of sale, a factory decal, a technician’s record — outranks any chart. Confirmed corrections are applied and then kept permanently as test cases.

If you are a technician, a dealer, a manufacturer archivist, or anyone who holds better records than we do, I would genuinely like to hear from you: grant@piano.wiki.

See the terms of use for data provenance and limits, and the privacy page for what the site records.