The Yamaha Logo

I’ve been familiar with the Yamaha brand for as long as I can remember. Initially, I knew them as a motorcycle company (apparently actually a separate company as of 1955), then as an audio equipment company and, finally, as an instrument maker.

Without giving it much thought, I’d always sort of interpreted their logo as maybe a stylized motorcycle wheel or something. 

As it turns out, though, musical instruments—specifically organs, quickly followed by pianos—were the company’s original product. According to their origin story, founder Torakusu Yamaha’s prototype organ in 1897 was a failure due to its abysmal tuning. Taking this feedback to heart, he studied music theory and instrument tuning in depth so he could try again, an attempt in which he found success and which marked the beginning of over a century of high-quality production.

After all that work, he decided to enshrine tuning, in the form of a tuning fork, in his new company’s logo. The first logo, trademarked in 1898, featured a fenghuang (a bird from Chinese mythology) holding a tuning fork. By 1916, the image of three crossed tuning forks—aka, the current company logo—had been trademarked and that image has featured in some way in each logo since. And, despite the motor division of Yamaha having been spun off, it has continued to use the crossed tuning fork mark as its logo.

For the uninitiated, tuning forks are two-tined metal forks designed to resonate at the frequency of a single note (e.g., 440 hz for the A above middle C) for use in tuning instruments. Invented way back in 1711 by British royal musician John Shore, the tuning fork remains useful to this day for instrumentalists and vocalists alike.