“If it was my piano, I’d chop it up and use it for kindling”: The ‘not great’ instrument that created Adele’s Set Fire to the Rain

Hit-making producer Fraser T Smith has no shortage of inspiring gear in his envy-inducing studio – from analogue synths to custom guitars and a gorgeous Steinway grand piano.

Housed in a converted barn nestled in the Chiltern Hills, his recording space is set up to offer visiting artists everything they could possibly need to unlock their creative potential.

As Smith explains in our new video interview, one particular instrument has a special place in his collection: a Yamaha upright piano that has appeared on tracks from Kano, Dave and Snow Patrol, and features prominently on Adele’s hit Set Fire to the Rain.

While the piano is beloved by Smith himself, and is evidently a popular option with the artists that pass through his studio, others have been a little slower to recognise its inherent qualities.

“I had a piano tuner that used to come in to tune it at my old place in London,” Smith explains. “After the second time he tuned it, he said, 'You know, this piano? You've got to get rid of it'. I said, 'What do you mean?' Slightly taken aback and mildly offended. He said, ‘It's just not great. It doesn't sound very good. If it was my piano, I’d chop it up and use it for kindling in my fire’.”

Despite having such a strong aversion to the instrument, after joining the dots on who Smith was and the artists he’d worked with, some rapid backtracking was in order.

“In a month he came back and said, 'There's a track I heard on the radio called Set Fire to the Rain by Adele. Did you make that with her?’,” Smith recalls. “I said yeah, and he asked which piano I used. I said, ‘The kindling one, you know, the one that you're going to chop up.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes. So it was on that piano. It sounds amazing’. And he sort of lovingly stroked it and said, ‘I always knew it had something special that piano’.”

It goes to show that what’s deemed as ‘quality’ when it comes to musical instruments isn’t necessarily objective.

“It's not that expensive a piano,” Smith explains. “I bought it for like, 1200 quid, which, at the time, was a lot of money, but in terms of uprights, that's not a huge amount. But it just sounds super bright and the attack on it sounds great.

“I used it on T-shirt Weather in the Manor by Kano. I sampled it, put it into the MPC and used it in a slightly different way like that. Used it on Black with Dave. I’ve just been using it on all the new Snow Patrol stuff, across their album The Forest is the Path, and the guys really love it.”

In our video interview Smith talks us through the design and philosophy behind his studio, the key pieces of gear used on records by the likes of Kasabian and Kae Tempest, and the live setup he uses with his own project, Future Utopia.

Future Utopia’s latest single, The Pleasure Trap, is out now.