Instruments - KEYBOARDS

hello and welcome to our section on keyboard instruments uh again these are not instruments usually found with the orchestra these are usually played more in Solo role or they are used to accompany other instruments we are going to talk about when you might see them with the orchestra um but it's very within very

specific forms and we're going to start with the one that you're probably the most familiar with which is the piano now if you recall when we talked about Dynamics which is how loud or soft a sound is you may remember we had the the Italian word piano which means soft as one of our Dynamic indicators and so

that means to play the music quietly so why is this instrument called Piano well just like my full name is Christopher most people just call me Chris so piano is actually a shortened version of its full name the full name of this instrument is piano Forte and you'll recall Forte from our discussion on Dynamics it means strong

in Italian and so if you do a literal translation of this uh instrument's name it means soft strong and the reason it's called that is that it was really the first keyboard instrument that really perfected the ability to play loudly or softly depending on how hard or soft you hit the individual keys each individual

uh key it can be played either louder or softer by how hard you strike the key so un let you know you can't like on the organ you're limited to making pretty much the entire instrument louder or softer and it has no real bearing on each individual key on the piano each individual key uh has a different

Dynamic uh range depending on how hard or soft you press it next time you're around a piano you can experiment with this you can lightly hit the key and notice how quiet it is and you can um don't don't bang on it you should never you know forcibly like be violent with a piano um but you can hit it