Piano

A piano is a musical instrument that is classified as a keyboard, percussion, or string instrument, depending on the system of classification used. more...

Home
Brass
DJ Gear & Lighting
Electronic
Equipment
Guitar
Harmonica
Instruction Books, CDs,...
Keyboard, Piano
Accordion, Concertina
Cases
Electronic Keyboards
Organ
Other Keyboard
Piano
Acoustic
Grand, Baby Grand
Upright
Digital
Other Pianos
Parts, Accessories
Piano Rolls
Other Instruments
Percussion
Pro Audio
Sheet Music, Song Books
String
Wholesale Lots
Woodwind

Playing the piano is wide-spread in western music for solo performance, chamber music, and accompaniment, and is also popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal.

The piano produces sound by striking steel strings with felt hammers. Vibrations are transmitted through the bridges to the soundboard.

The word piano is a shortened form of the word pianoforte, which is seldom used except in formal language and derived from the original Italian name for the instrument, gravicèmbalo col piano e forte (literally harpsichord with soft and loud). This refers to the ability of the piano to produce notes at different volumes depending on how hard the keys are pressed.

As a keyboard stringed instrument, the piano is similar to the clavichord and harpsichord. These three instruments differ in their mechanisms of sound production. In a harpsichord, strings are plucked by quills or something similar. In the clavichord, strings are struck by tangents, which remain in contact with the string. In a piano, the strings are struck by hammers which immediately rebound, leaving the string to vibrate freely.

Early history

Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padova, Italy, invented the first pianoforte. He called it a gravicèmbalo con piano e forte. It is not entirely clear when he built this instrument, but an inventory made by Cristofori's employers, the Medici (pron./'Mèdici/) family, indicates the existence of an early Cristofori instrument by the year 1701. Cristofori built only about twenty pianofortes before he died in 1731; the three that have survived until today date from the 1720s.

Like many other inventions, the pianoforte was founded on earlier technological innovations. In particular, it benefited from centuries of work on the harpsichord, which had shown the most effective ways to construct the case, soundboard, bridge, and keyboard. Cristofori, himself a harpsichord maker, was well acquainted with this body of knowledge.

Cristofori's great success was in solving, without any prior example, the fundamental mechanical problem of piano design: the hammers must strike the string, but not touch it once they have struck (which would damp the sound). Moreover, the hammers must return to their rest position without bouncing violently, and it must be possible to repeat a note rapidly. Cristofori's piano action served as a model for the many different approaches to piano actions that followed. Cristofori's early instruments were made with thin strings and were much quieter than the modern piano. Compared to the clavichord (the only previous keyboard instrument capable of dynamic nuance), however, they were considerably louder and had more sustaining power.

Read more at Wikipedia.org