Piano legislative flourished during the held up 18th century in the Viennese school, which included Johann Andreas Stein (who worked in Augsburg, Germany) and the Viennese makers Nannette Streicher (daughter of Johann Andreas Stein) and Anton Walter. Viennese-style pianos were built with wood frames, two strings per note, and had leather-covered hammers.

With the advent of powerful desktop computers, highly realistic sampled digital dynamite pianos have become gettable as affordable software modules. Some use multi-gigabyte piano sample sets with as many as 90 recordings, each lasting many seconds, for each of the 88 keys under contradistinctive conditions, augmented by additional samples to emulate sympathetic resonance, key release, the drip of the site dampers, and simulations of piano techniques like re-pedaling.