Piano Learning – Learn How to Play the Piano

Get to know more about the “piano” in terms of structure and functional role is important before you kick off your piano learning – learn how to play the piano course.

What is the “PIANO”?
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard.  Piano is widely used in Western Music for solo performance, ensemble use, chamber music, and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal. Although not portable and often expensive, the piano’s versatility and ubiquity have made it one of the most familiar musical instruments.

Pressing a key on the piano’s keyboard causes a felt covered hammer to strike steel strings. The hammers rebound, allowing the strings to continue vibrating at their resonant frequency.  These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a  sounding board that couples the acoustic energy to the air so that it can be heard as sound. When the key is released, a damper stops the string’s vibration. Pianos are sometimes classified as both a percussion and a stringed instrument.  According to the Hornbostel-Sachs method of music classification, it is grouped with Chordophones.

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, clavicembalo [or gravicembalo] col piano e forte (literally harpsichord with soft and loud). This refers to the instrument’s responsiveness to keyboard touch, which allows the pianist to produce notes at different dynamic levels by controlling the speed with which the hammers hit the strings.

Types
Modern pianos come in two basic configurations (with subcategories): the grand piano and the upright piano.

Grand piano

Upright Piano
Upright pianos, also called vertical pianos, are more compact because the frame and strings are vertical. The hammers move horizontally, and are returned to their resting position by springs which are prone to wear and tear.

Upright pianos with unusually tall frames and long strings are sometimes called “upright grand” pianos.

Some authors classify modern pianos according to their height and, to modifications of the action that are necessary to accommodate the height.
* Studio pianos are around 42 to 45 inches tall. This is the shortest cabinet that can accommodate a ‘full-sized’ action located above the keyboard.
* Console pianos have a compact action (shorter hammers), and are a few inches shorter than studio models.
* The top of a Spinet model barely rises above the keyboard. The action is located below, operated by vertical wires that are attached to the backs of the keys.
* Anything taller than a studio piano is called an upright.

Player piano
Toy Piano began to be manufactured in the 19th century. In 1863, Henri Fourneaux invented the player piano, which “plays itself” from a piano roll without the need for a pianist. The player piano is a piano that records a performance using rolls of paper with perforations, and then replays the performance using pneumatic devices. Modern equivalents for the player piano are instruments like the Bosendorfer CEUS and the Yamaha Disklavier, which uses solenoids and MIDI instead of pneumatics and rolls. Silent pianos, which allow a regular piano to be used converted to a digital instrument, are a recent innovation and are becoming more popular.

Irving Berlin played a special piano called the transposing piano, which was invented in 1801 by Edward Ryley. It had a lever under the keyboard used to alter the music to any key. One of Berlin’s pianos is in the Smithsonian Museum. For much of his career, Berlin only knew how to play the black keys. But with his ‘trick piano’ he was no longer limited to the key of F-sharp.

A relatively recent development is the prepared piano, which is used in contemporary art music. A prepared piano is a standard grand piano which has had objects placed inside it before a performance in order to alter its sound, or which has had its mechanism changed in some way. The scores for music for prepared piano often instruct the pianist to insert pieces of rubber or small pieces of metal (screws or washers) in between the strings. These added items either mute the strings or create unusual vibrating sounds.

A relatively recent development is the prepared piano, which is used in contemporary art music. A prepared piano is a standard grand piano which has had objects placed inside it before a performance in order to alter its sound, or which has had its mechanism changed in some way. The scores for music for prepared piano often instruct the pianist to insert pieces of rubber or small pieces of metal (screws or washers) in between the strings. These added items either mute the strings or create unusual vibrating sounds.

Since the 1980s, digital pianos have been available, which use digital sampling technology to reproduce the sound of each piano note. The best digital pianos are sophisticated, with features including working pedals, weighted keys, multiple voices, and MIDI interfaces. However, with such technology, it is difficult to duplicate one particular aspect of acoustic pianos, namely that when the damper pedal (see below) is depressed, the strings not struckvibrate sympathetically when other strings are struck, as well as the unique instrument-specific mathematical non-linearity of partials on any given unison. Since this sympathetic vibration  is considered central to piano tone, many digital pianos do not sound the same as the best acoustic pianos. Progress is being made in this area by including physical models of sympathetic vibration in the synthesis software. Some higher end digital pianos, such as the  series, or the Kawai MP8 series, produced in the last few years incorporate string resonance technology to overcome this limitation.

With the advent of powerful desktop computers, highly realistic sampled digital grand pianos have become available 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 different conditions, augmented by additional samples to emulate sympathetic resonance, key release, the drop of the dampers, and simulations of piano techniques like re-pedaling.

Article Source: Piano from Wikipedia, The Encyclopedia