MI Pro

Yamaha products have always had a certain cache in the MI industry; as a gargantuan multinational corporation, whose brand is universally recognised in many areas outside of our musical arena, the company has a reputation for well-crafted, often innovative and always extremely playable instruments.

In 2008, Yamaha has already set its stall out to further bolster its image as a manufacturer committed to quality, and to convey that message of well-priced, well-made product to both retail and consumers alike. The combination of traditional hand-building methods and the latest new musical technologies flavour many of the company’s products, and it is one of Yamaha’s big strengths.

This theme of combining the old and the new to devastating effect is one which this year should see further interesting developments within the Yamaha stable; rakes of new product both at NAMM in January and at the Frankfurt Musikmesse demonstrate a company not content simply to sit on its laurels.

“We’re very proud of our heritage,” says sales and marketing director for Yamaha Music UK Richard Hodgson. “Yamaha has been in existence for 121 years, so we genuinely have master craftsmen and people working in various factories around the world who are literally handing things down from generation to generation.

“In fusing that sort of tradition with new technology, we’re looking right across the range; if we take for example the DTXtreme that we previewed at NAMM and are giving a European launch at Frankfurt, that really is a marriage between the latest electronic drum technology, and our own experiences in making acoustic kits for 40 years. We source our birch and other woods from the Hokkaido region in Japan, and in using those acoustic kits and sampling them, when you turn on the DTXtreme you have the highest quality samples taken from our own kits.”

The ability to draw on expertise and product from such a vast catalogue is something that many manufacturers simply do not have the luxury of using; thanks to its size and dedication to excellence, Yamaha is able repeatedly to draw on old-school skills and knowledge to add value to products across the board.

“For example, we have been able to use our top of the range Concert Grand Piano CFIIIS and everything we’ve learned about piano manufacture and apply that to our keyboards, so with things like graded hammer action they really feel very accurate. Due to that, we now have places like the Royal Academy of Music saying they’ll only use Yamaha pianos, and in their practice suites they use Yamaha gear because they recognise it sounds so good.

“That theme really runs through; we’ve been making guitars for over 40 years, and we’ve got our own luthiers who are many generations down the line now. We make some beautiful acoustic guitars, and have a worldwide roster of players both classical and modern who are using these guitars.

“If we take the latest L-Series, which are our hand-crafted acoustics (and they really are hand-crafted, people have visited our workshops in Japan and been blown away by the level of craftsmanship that goes into these products) we’ve introduced the latest ART pickup technology, which is getting incredible reviews. We’re getting top-class players knocking on our door to use them.”

As well as continuing to expand its market share in traditional markets, the forward-looking nature of the company’s product development looks set to continue, expanding the boundaries of what is possible for an MI manufacturer to achieve given the right attitude.

“If you check out some of our products, you’ll see we’re pushing ahead in many different directions,” enthuses Hodgson. “Take the A2 series of electric guitars and basses; they’re cutting edge – they’re vibrant, they’re new, and instead of simply putting out an electric guitar like everyone else is doing, we’re trying to create new markets, such as looking at the lifestyle consumer who might be attracted to a modern shape, with LED lighting and a very lightweight body that sounds really good. We’re trying to open the market beyond the traditional, which is very important to us, while integrating strong traditional values about how to do business and hand crafted workmanship in the instruments themselves.”

With plenty of considered, high-quality product, the second area of focus for Yamaha lies in working together with dealers to ensure the best possible end result for retailer and consumer alike, a commitment that has been echoed with the arrival of its Essential training programme (as announced in MI Pro February 2008).

“The Essential training and the way of delivering information and knowledge in the 21st century that is valid to the shop staff and is once again a combination of traditional and modern techniques,” continues Hodgson. “We’ll be getting dealer staff in, giving them the product knowledge and helping out with other areas of training. We’ll be giving them documents to take away, as well as online resources. We’re keen to recognise the importance of digital media in helping support shop floor staff.”

The training days, at which dealers will get the opportunity to work closely alongside Yamaha product specialists, aim to furnish shop floor staff with exactly the sort of skills needed to not only provide the best service possible to end users, but also to maximise sales.

This fresh commitment to retail has been the result of some deep thinking in the Yamaha camp, and demonstrates the company’s dedication to keeping itself at the top of its game stems from a keen desire to keep in touch with the grass roots of the industry.

“For 2008, we sat down and questioned internally what the Yamaha advantage is,” says Hodgson. “If you’re a dealer or a consumer, what’s the advantage of buying Yamaha? We’ve come together with a lot of guiding principles, and one of those is that we have a large number of big name international artists using our instruments, and we can push consumers into stores to ask for our products, so we want to really underline the training aspect.

“The Yamaha Corporation recently appointed a new president, Mr Imamura, who sends out news and letters about how we should be conducting ourselves and what we should be aiming for, and his guiding principles about looking at the human resource both internally at Yamaha and within our dealers, how we should be training and developing people as much as possible. This really underpins what we do.

“We have a new drive we are rolling out in April featuring individual training programmes across guitar, drums, music production and pro audio that isn’t all entirely product led – we want to be able to help sales staff learn about how best to serve the needs of the consumer. Sales staff don’t always necessarily have the time to work on these skills, and it’s an educational thing that we want to help with.

“What we’re trying to do is develop further what we already have, which is a dealer base of extremely knowledgeable staff that are going to be able to help consumers. We feel that perhaps because we are the biggest musical instruments manufacturer in the world, we’re very happy to go that extra mile to create that advantage to buying Yamaha against other products. And that’s a combination of having the right product, the heritage and the infrastructure to deliver.”