Piano Learning – Learn How to Play the Piano

Upright piano

Vertical Piano Action
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.

Other types

Player piano
Toy Pianos 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 Yamahab Dsiklavier , 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 prepare grand 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 struck vibrate 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 Yamaha Clavinova 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-pedal.

Article Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia