Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it – Tom Lehrer
The piano was invented in the year 1709 in Italy by Bartolomeo di Francesco Cristofori.
The original name of the piano is Pianoforte. This is because of its ability to play notes both quietly (piano) and loudly (forte).
For a piano to make its full range of strong, there are 230 strings in a piano.
The piano is both a percussion and a string instrument. However, most believe it to be a percussion instrument as the hammers strike the strings inside.
The largest piano ever made was by Adrian Mann, a piano tuner from New Zealand. It weighs 1.4 tons and is 5.7 meters long. It took this 25-year-old 4 years to build it!
One of Cristofori’s original pianos is still in existence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The most expensive piano called the “Chrystal Piano” was designed by Canadian manufacturer Heintzman Pianos and was played for the first time in front of an audience at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 by Chinese pianist Lang Lang. The piano was sold at an auction for $3.22 million.
What are those pedals at the bottom of the piano for? The pedal on the left is a damper pedal. It moves the hammers closer to the string, which makes the sound softer. The middle pedal is a sostenuto pedal. It sustains only the notes you press, and then allows you to play others without sustain. The right pedal is the sustain pedal and is used the most often.
Piano Has The Largest Note Range Of Any Instrument. Most instruments can play in several octaves, but none can achieve it quite as the piano can. A typical 88 key piano can play up to 7 octaves. That’s not even counting pianos with extra keys that can add an additional 2 to 3 octaves on top of that.
The piano has over 12,000 parts, 10,000 of which are moving. It is an enormous number of small pieces that need to work perfectly to get the sound that you want out of the instrument.
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