Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

CREATING BARRIERS 271
can have the accompanist ’ s role recorded so it will be available
for practice sessions with adjustable tempo — no longer does
practice require a live accompanist.
A teacher can also benefit from the record and playback
feature, especially with the slow - down option. Replaying student
efforts can be used to demonstrate technique or to help display
errors or deficiencies in play. A link to background music can
serve to make scale drills more useful and enjoyable for the student.
Further, practice with one hand can be more meaningful if
the music from the other hand is being played by the Disklavier.
A record of a student ’ s early efforts can provide a baseline against
which to demonstrate future improvement. Also, the most recent
models allow users to connect two pianos in different locations.
A teacher on one end and a student at the other can see and
hear each other play. As a result, it becomes feasible for top
artists to remotely teach students around the world. Further,
piano competitions are held featuring contestants playing on
Disklaviers in remote locations.
Like the original player piano, the Disklavier was based on
dozens of innovations over decades and would not have been
possible without advances in computers and related equipment.
Timing was important, but so were instinct and commitment.
Researchers at Japan ’ s University of Okayama developed a
rough prototype in 1979. Yamaha saw the potential and became
fi rst its partner and soon thereafter the developer of the concept.
There were, in addition to technical issues, the fact that some
important intellectual property (IP) rights protected by patents
were owned by other fi rms. Terry Lewis of Yamaha Corporation
of America impressed with the concept, decided in 1986 to
commit to it even without support from others at Yamaha. In a
critical step, he acquired some of the key IP rights from a company
that had no plans or ability to exploit the patents they
held. Later he hired an inventor named Wayne Stahnke in
order to obtain access to the rest of the needed rights and to get