Piano Store FAQs
When was the piano created?
The piano was created by Bartolomeo Cristofori around the year 1700. Cristofori was the keeper of the instruments under the Medici family in Italy, and his creation was the birth child of the deficiencies of two different instruments. One was the harpsichord, and the other was the clavichord. The clavichord had a lot of control in the hands of the musician and could be manipulated to show different moods in the piece, but it was not sufficiently loud enough to play in a full blown concert. The harpsichord was percussively loud, but had no personality to back up that robustness. By the end of the 1700s, Cristofori had fabricated the new five octave instrument to the delight of the up and coming crowd of pianists. Later artisans would improve on his design making the octave range longer and the sound more clear, as well as better muted with the pedal system.
What is a player piano and when was it invented?
The player piano was a piano that could run itself along a piano roll to play a musical piece in real time according to the drum that was in it at the time. The player piano was introduced in 1863 by Henri Founeaux. The piano roil is inscribed onto rolls of paper with perforations in them in order to symbolize notes. The piano player plays the roll, rolling it at a normalized rate of so that the notes sound like they are being played in real time using pneumatic devices. Although no longer in use, modern day player pianos do exist such as the Bosendorfer CEUS and the Yama Disklavier. However, due to the advances in technology these pianos utilize solenoids and MIDI rather than pneumatics and rolls.
What are the differences between the different forms of pianos?
A grand piano was the original concert length and breadth, now widely accepted piano made possible by John Broadwood and his artisans in 1777. The concert grand is now understood to be between 2.2 and 3 meters long, or nearly 10 feet. The length of the strings allows the harmonics of each of the percussive strikes to come out in full. The sound is fuller and the loudness of the instrument is immense. Smaller versions known as the parlor grand range between 1.7 and 2.2 meters long, and have some of the inequalities of sound that is not to be found in the concert grand. There is also the baby grand which is small that either of its predecessors. String tightening has enables the baby grand to produce the original harmonic sound of the string strike, but similar to the parlor grand, it does not have many of the overtones that musicians and concerto goers have come to identify. There are two more categories, the upright and the digital piano. The upright was created as a means to save space with the strings being aligned vertically instead of horizontally like the grand. The upright gained wide popularity in the 1800s because it was also less expensive and more portable, being used in dance halls, bars, and small homes as a method to practice. Finally, the digital piano made its debut in the 1900s with the technological advancements that took place in this time period. Companies like Yamaha and others are quickly asserting themselves with instruments that feel like a piano, run of electricity, and can record, playback, and play other instruments with the same note. The variety is nearly endless in this classification.
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