Most Popular

Unbangul accordion and bayan are getting popular in different countries of the world, including Russia and Italy. These musical instruments are produced at the Pyongyang Musical Instrument Factory.

With domestic materials and technology 

An accordion and a bayan are made of more than 8 000 parts respectively and there are as many as over 10 000 processes for making and assembling them and completing them into products.

The factory strives to make materials and introduce technology needed for the manufacture of accordions and bayans by its own efforts.

It conducts a mass technical innovation movement to replace the imported materials used for making the wind bed of the accordion in the past with domestic raw and other materials. It also produces by itself such parts as bellow corner iron and bayan buttons. It makes various facilities such as a rotary plating machine, five-axis CNC pattern processing lathe and reed elasticity measuring device to steadily improve the quality of products.

Workers of the factory are involved in the study-while-you-work system including the online education faculty of Kim Chaek University of Technology to acquire advanced science and technology and become inventors and creators of original technical plans who invent and introduce valuable scientific and technological achievements.

The factory attaches importance to playing ability in the improvement of the technical knowledge and skills of employees. It is their unanimous view that the instrument makers should work from the standpoint and attitude of the instrument players.

Therefore, in order to train skilled workers, lectures are given on the basic theories of music and playing of accordion, along with computer application, the science of instrument making and others. In the course of learning to play the accordion with a correct understanding of notes, practising the discrimination of tone quality and sound volume and heightening the sense of touch of keyboard, the trainees acquire the skills and methodology of making musical instruments which are needed to preserve the unique and refined tone quality.

Devotion to making of musical instruments

The factory is associated with the feats performed by seniors, including Choe Je Ha and Kim Son Hyong, who made musical instruments on the front line during the Fatherland Liberation War (1950-1953) and who made the first accordion in the DPRK. The new generations including Kim Kyong Hyang, who grew up listening to the stories of the previous generations that the instruments made by processing the remainder of burnt wood on heights and electric wires during the war gave the soldiers of the Korean People’s Army confidence in victory and raised their fighting morale, devote themselves to making musical instruments by inheriting the spirit of the forerunners.

Many other employees, including Choe Jong Suk and Choe Jong Hye, who are sisters, have worked in the factory generation after generation to manufacture more wonderful musical instruments that give pleasure and optimism to people.

Their special attachment to musical instruments leads to their pride in the job and in the course of their work dozens of couples tied the knot.

The unanimous aspiration of the employees to help and lead one another forward and constantly create new things in the workplace full of love and affection results in collective innovation.