Instruments - Part 23

 Piano

The piano is used in all types of music from popular to jazz to classical.

OK, I admit the piano is not usually used in a marching band.

You don't have to have a grand piano to play and enjoy the instrument.  An upright piano works just fine.  The piano is one of only two instruments that millions of people actually have at home and learn to play, the other being the guitar.

Just for completeness, there's a third type of piano – the digital piano.  It's like a synthesizer, but it has a full 88-key piano keyboard, and striking the key harder makes the note louder, like a real piano and unlike a synthesizer keyboard.

Inside a piano are the "strings" (actually steel wires) that produce the sound, strung on a cast-iron frame.  The frame has to be strong, because the total tension of all the strings is over 20 tons of pressure!  Under the frame (or behind it, in an upright piano) is the soundboard, which amplifies the sound.

Below the strings (or in front, in an upright piano) is the action, diagrammed above, which converts the movement of a piano key into the movement of a felt hammer (#11 in the diagram) that strikes the string.  The action is extremely complicated to allow the hammer to swing freely with a force proportional to how hard the piano key is struck, but also to allow the player to play very fast repeated notes.  The action also lifts a felt damper off of the string while the key is depressed.  When the key is released, the damper stops the sound of the string.

The piano was invented in Italy around the year 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori.  Its great advantage over the older harpsichord is that the piano lets the player control the loudness of each note, from very soft to very loud, depending on how hard the key is struck; whereas a harpsichord has no control over loudness.  Because of this, the new instrument was called the pianoforte (soft-loud in Italian), later shortened to piano.

A piano has a huge range.  Its keyboard of 88 notes basically spans the entire orchestral range from the lowest tuba to the highest piccolo.

The piano also has 3 (sometimes 2) foot pedals.  The right or sustain pedal (sometimes erroneously called the loud pedal), which this player is using, lifts all the felt dampers off of the strings, so the notes continue to sound after the player releases the keys.

The left or soft pedal makes the notes quieter.  On a grand piano, it does this by moving the entire keyboard and the action connected to it to the right by a fraction of an inch.  Only the very lowest notes have one thick string.  All the other notes have two or three strings; moving the keyboard and action means that the hammer strikes one less string, producing a quieter sound.  On an upright piano, the soft pedal moves the hammers closer to the strings to produce a quieter sound.

The center or sostenuto pedal is seldom used.  It lifts the felt dampers, thus sustaining the sound, of only those keys which were depressed when the pedal was pushed.

A piano normally comes with a piano bench.  This is a standard piano bench.

In this bench, the player can turn the knob on the side to raise or lower the bench.  But adjusting the bench won't fix the real problem here, which is his hair.

We end today with a little excerpt of a piano being played in an unconventional way.