Alright this is the second instrument in our keyboard family.
This is a harpsichord. You can see there's a lot of things in common with
the piano has the same basic sort of shape
long and sort of tapering into the middle. It's got a keyboard,
but what do you notice about this keyboard? Should see a couple of things,
one
there's not just one are actually two keyboards. Some harpsichords
actually only have one keyboard
but two is a more like the standard. You'll also notice that the keys are
backwards in terms of color
what used to be white keys on the piano are black
and the black keys on the piano are now white. The layout is exactly the same
it's just that the colors are reversed. I have no idea
why that is. You can do some research and you can let me know why they decide to
reverse the colors,
but this is fairly standard. You will see some
modern harpsichord where they go white and black just because
of what it is, but this is the basic construction for harpsichord.
So we play it the same way, we press the keys down, (playing harpsichord)
but you can see that it's not very loud because
I wasn't being timid about that.
I'm pushing that just about as hard as I can push it so you can see why the piano
was such an advantage
this poor little instrument working as hard as I can with it
you can barely hear it did 10 feet away. That's because
the way that the instrument produces the sound. So now lets get
inside this harpsichord and see how it actually creates sound.
Now on the inside the harpsichord let's look at the difference between it and
the piano.
First remember we had that whole long row of black damper things on the top is nothing like
that in here.
There's no hammers here. Instead we have what looks like a bunch of
gigantic screws or something lined up together here.
What happens here inside the harpsichord is instead a hammer striking the strings,
what happens is that one of these little devices
comes up and plucks this string. There's actually a little piece right here that's
really hard to see
that comes up grabs the string and that's what makes the sound.
It's called the plectrum, that's it's technical term. So this is
considered a string instrument
as well as keyboard because the way the sound is produced, the sound is produced by
plucking a string.
Now just like violins you know you go the orchestra they're forever tuning
the thing. A
harpsichord has to be tuned every time you want to play it.
A piano will stay in tune for quite a long time a harpsichord goes out of tune
very quickly and we didn't have this tuned for us so
we're not going to try to play anything for you that's real but,
but you can see them it's a very different kind of sound. It's,
it's string sounding, it's not like the big powerful sound of the piano.
You can also see that the strings go laterally on
our piano strings were all strung this direction so now we have strings
strung in what we call these courses. So they're one up above
each other and so we have whole row of these are plucking
various different strings on the inside. So that's what makes a harpsichord very
different from a piano. It
can't play nearly as loudly because the strings can only do what the strings can
do.
Now you can create some different-- (plays)
you can see that those sounds are a little bit different little, bit out of tune as well, but
but the tone quality can be different. They can
some stop things here on the front do some things with pedals that actually
change the sound quality,
but it's always going to be fairly soft, it's always going to have a sort of a
tinkly sound to it just because the way that the sound is produced.
A little bit better than Schroeder's piano on Peanuts but,
(plays instrument)
not significantly better than what you think of
as kind of a good toy piano. But it's a very interesting sound it's used a lot in the
Baroque period, so you'll hear a lot of it when we listen to Bach in that
period of time.
In fact if you hear harpsichord being played you can pretty much guess it's
from one of two periods,
it's either from the Baroque or it's from the modern period when it kinda made a
resurgence because it was an old sound it was kind of cool.
So that's a harpsichord lots of strings,
not as many as a piano, no metal you see that there's no big metal board
here. These strings are strung very
much more loose than the tension is much more loose on the harpsichord.
Which also makes so it can't play very loudly. So
that's our second keyboard instrument.