Accordions are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free reed aerophone type. The essential characteristic of the accordion is to combine in one instrument a melody section, also called the diskant, usually on the right-hand manual, with an accompaniment or Basso continuo functionality on the left-hand. The musician normally plays the melody on buttons or keys on the right-hand side, and the accompaniment on bass or pre-set chord buttons on the left-hand side. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist.
The harmonica, also known as a French harp or mouth organ, is a free reed wind instrument used worldwide in many musical genres, notably in blues, American folk music, classical music, jazz, country, and rock. The many types of harmonica include diatonic, chromatic, tremolo, octave, orchestral, and bass versions. A harmonica is played by using the mouth to direct air into or out of one holes along a mouthpiece. Behind each hole is a chamber containing at least one reed. The most common is the diatonic Richter-tuned with ten air passages and twenty reeds, often called the blues harp. A harmonica reed is a flat, elongated spring typically made of brass, stainless steel, or bronze, which is secured at one end over a slot that serves as an airway. When the free end is made to vibrate by the player's air, it alternately blocks and unblocks the airway to produce sound.
The Rhodes piano is an electric piano invented by Harold Rhodes, which became popular in the 1970s. Like a conventional piano, the Rhodes generates sound with keys and hammers, but instead of strings, the hammers strike thin metal tines, which vibrate next to an electromagnetic pickup. The signal is then sent through a cable to an external keyboard amplifier and speaker.
Mbira are a family of musical instruments, traditional to the Shona people of Zimbabwe. They consist of a wooden board with attached staggered metal tines, played by holding the instrument in the hands and plucking the tines with the thumbs, the right forefinger, and sometimes the left forefinger. Musicologists classify it as a lamellaphone, part of the plucked idiophone family of musical instruments. In Eastern and Southern Africa, there are many kinds of mbira, often accompanied by the hosho, a percussion instrument. It is often an important instrument played at religious ceremonies, weddings, and other social gatherings. The "Art of crafting and playing Mbira/Sansi, the finger-plucking traditional musical instrument in Malawi and Zimbabwe" was added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020.
An electric piano is a musical instrument that has a piano-style musical keyboard, where sound is produced by means of mechanical hammers striking metal strings or reeds or wire tines, which leads to vibrations which are then converted into electrical signals by pickups. The pickups are connected to an instrument amplifier and loudspeaker to reinforce the sound sufficiently for the performer and audience to hear. Unlike a synthesizer, the electric piano is not an electronic instrument. Instead, it is an electro-mechanical instrument. Some early electric pianos used lengths of wire to produce the tone, like a traditional piano. Smaller electric pianos used short slivers of steel to produce the tone. The earliest electric pianos were invented in the late 1920s; the 1929 Neo-Bechstein electric grand piano was among the first. Probably the earliest stringless model was Lloyd Loar's Vivi-Tone Clavier. A few other noteworthy producers of electric pianos include Baldwin Piano and Organ Company, and the Wurlitzer Company.
The Clavinet is an electrically amplified clavichord invented by Ernst Zacharias and manufactured by the Hohner company of Trossingen, West Germany, from 1964 to 1982. The instrument produces sounds with rubber pads, each matching one of the keys and responding to a keystroke by striking a given point on a tensioned string, and was designed to resemble the Renaissance-era clavichord.
A lamellophone is a member of the family of musical instruments that makes its sound by a thin vibrating plate called a lamella or tongue, which is fixed at one end and has the other end free. When the musician depresses the free end of a plate with a finger or fingernail, and then allows the finger to slip off, the released plate vibrates. An instrument may have a single tongue or a series of multiple tongues.
The Hohner Pianet is a type of electro-mechanical piano built by the Hohner company of Trossingen, West Germany and designed by Ernst Zacharias. The Pianet was a variant of his earlier reed-based Hohner electric piano, the Cembalet, which, like the Pianet, was intended for home use. Hohner offered both keyboards in their range until 1968. The Pianet production consisted of two distinctly different mechanism groups with characteristically different sound. The first group, lasting from introduction to 1977, had ground stainless steel reeds, a pick-up using variable capacitance, and leather-faced activation pads. The second group from 1977 until the end of production used rolled spring-steel reeds, electro-magnetic pick-ups, and moulded silicone rubber activation pads.
Hohner Musikinstrumente GmbH & Co. KG is a German manufacturer of musical instruments, founded in 1857 by Matthias Hohner (1833–1902). The roots of the Hohner firm are in Trossingen, Baden-Württemberg. Since its foundation, and though known for its harmonicas, Hohner has manufactured a wide range of instruments, such as kazoos, accordions, recorder flutes, melodicas, banjos, electric, acoustic, resonator and classical guitars, basses, mandolins and ukuleles.
A button accordion is a type of accordion on which the melody-side keyboard consists of a series of buttons. This differs from the piano accordion, which has piano-style keys. Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs categorize it as a free reed aerophone in their classification of instruments, published in 1914. The sound from the instrument is produced by the vibration of air in reeds. Button accordions of various types are particularly common in European countries and countries where European people settled. The button accordion is often confused with the concertina; the button accordion's buttons are on the front of the instrument, where as the concertina's are on the sides and pushed in parallel with the bellows.
The Claviola is a musical instrument that was designed in the 1960s by Hohner technician and designer Ernst Zacharias. The instrument was produced for a few months in the late 1990s before being discontinued.
"Ladytron" is a song by Bryan Ferry, recorded by his band Roxy Music and appearing on their eponymous debut album. The British electronic band Ladytron took their name from this song.
John Lennon's musical instruments were both diverse and many, and his worldwide fame resulted in his personal choices having a strong impact on cultural preferences.
A free-bass system is a system of left-hand bass buttons on an accordion, arranged to give the performer greater ability to play melodies with the left-hand and form one's own chords. The left-hand buttonboard consists of single-note buttons with a range of three octaves or more, in contrast to the standard Stradella bass system, which offers a shorter range of single bass notes, plus preset major, minor, dominant seventh, and diminished chord buttons. The term "free-bass system" refers to various left-hand manual systems that provide this functionality: The Stradella system does not have buttons for different octaves of the bass notes, which limits the types of melodies and basslines that can be performed with the left hand.
The Cembalet is a type of electro-mechanical piano built by the Hohner company of Trossingen, West Germany from the late-1950s to the late 1960s, and designed by Ernst Zacharias. It was a reed-based electric piano intended for home use, and the first keyboard produced by Hohner as a piano-like instrument rather than an instrument having the sustained note of an organ. It was adopted by popular musicians for recording and performance in the early 1960s because it was portability and easy to amplify electronically.
Pianoteq is a software synthesizer that features real-time MIDI-control of digital physically modeled pianos and related instruments, including electric piano, harp, harpsichord, fortepiano, and various metallophones. It is usable as a stand-alone program for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms, or as a plug in for VSTi hosts and two VSTi counterpart for use with digital audio workstations.
Damping is a technique in music for altering the sound of a musical instrument by reducing oscillations or vibrations. Damping methods are used for a number of instruments.
Ernst Zacharias was a German musician and engineer. In the 1950s and 1960s, he invented various electro-mechanical musical instruments for the German musical instrument manufacturer Hohner, including the Cembalet, the Clavinet, the Guitaret, and the Pianet. The Claviola, a modernisation of the sheng and the Harmonetta, a mouth-blown concertina-keyboarded instrument, was also invented by Zacharias. He additionally invented the Electra-Melodica, the first commercially produced wind synthesizer. DEPATIS lists 90 patents by Ernst Zacharias for Hohner, including plastic recorders and watch and clock mechanisms.
Vintage Vibe is a manufacturer of electric pianos, based in Rockaway, New Jersey. The company also offers repair and restoration services for electric pianos, keyboard instruments and amplifiers, brand new parts for vintage electric pianos, and manufactures a modern tine-based electro-mechanical piano.
