Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: Lukas
Even if you're not familiar with the musical instrument called the theremin, chances are you've heard its ghostly sound.
Ten to Thirty Years Normal regulation and voicing will maintain good tone and touch if usage is moderate. If the piano suffers wide temperature and...
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The easiest instruments to learn are ukulele, harmonica, bongos, piano, and glockenspiel. Learning these instruments as an adult will be...
Read More »Even if you're not familiar with the musical instrument called the theremin, chances are you've heard its ghostly sound. It's featured in "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin, as well as some of the band's other songs. A theremin-like instrument sometimes called the electro-theremin is used for one of the signature parts of "Good Vibrations" by The Beach Boys. And it’s a musical staple of science fiction movies. The theremin is unique because of how it's played: you make music without touching it. How that's done will be demonstrated this Saturday at Porter Square Books in Cambridge by Somerville theremin player Jon Bernhardt. He'll be appearing with Montreal writer Sean Michaels, who has a new novel out, "Us Conductors," about the inventor of the theremin. Bernhardt came to WBUR's studios this week and played his theremin during a conversation with All Things Considered host Sacha Pfeiffer. He described the instrument this way: "Typically it's a box of some sort with two antennae that come out of either side. One antenna controls the pitch and the other antenna controls the volume, and as you move your hands closer and farther away from the two antennae you control the sound of the instrument." Playing a theremin is "very difficult," Bernhardt added, because the instrument is "very sensitive to your body movement. You could wiggle your pinky and the pitch could change by a major third. You could go from an open fist to a closed fist and you could be changing the pitch by an octave." For physics nerds, here's Bernhardt explanation of the science behind the theremin: "Basically, your body is acting as a plate and a capacitor, so your body is sort of ground in a capacitor, and as you move your hand away from or closer to the antenna you're changing the capacitance, which in turn affects an inductor, which in turn affects an oscillator, and that controls the pitch." "On more than one occasion when I've played the theremin," Bernhardt added, "people don't believe that it's the instrument. They think I'm humming secretly!"
Typically, most piano tuners charge by the hour, but $100 to $200 every 6-12 months is much cheaper than having the piano restrung. This process...
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Staining your wood not only protects it from rot and water damage, it also blocks the UV rays from the sun that cause your wood to “gray,” making...
Read More »The discovery pushes back humanity's musical roots. A vulture-bone flute discovered in a European cave is likely the world's oldest recognizable musical instrument and pushes back humanity's musical roots, a new study says.
A vulture-bone flute discovered in a European cave is likely the world's oldest recognizable musical instrument and pushes back humanity's musical roots, a new study says. Found with fragments of mammoth-ivory flutes, the 40,000-year-old artifact also adds to evidence that music may have given the first European modern humans a strategic advantage over Neanderthals, researchers say. The bone-flute pieces were found in 2008 at Hohle Fels, a Stone Age cave in southern Germany, according to the study, led by archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany. With five finger holes and a V-shaped mouthpiece, the almost complete bird-bone flute—made from the naturally hollow wing bone of a griffon vulture—is just 0.3 inch (8 millimeters) wide and was originally about 13 inches (34 centimeters) long. Flute fragments found earlier at the nearby site of Geissenklösterle have been dated to around 35,000 years ago. The newfound flutes, though, "date to the very period of settlement in the region by modern humans ... about 40,000 years ago," Conard said. The mammoth-ivory flutes would have been especially challenging to make, the team said. Using only stone tools, the flute maker would have had to split a section of curved ivory along its natural grain. The two halves would then have been hollowed out, carved, and fitted together with an airtight seal.
Tips on how to make piano lessons fun for children: Don't Spend A Lot of Time on One Task. ... Throw In Some Games. ... Let Children Explore the...
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The science behind sticking one foot out The Science Of Us Sleep Institute says that sticking one of your feet outside of your blankets is a...
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triplet A triplet—a type of “tuplet”—is a group of three notes played inside another note-length. It's a portion of musical time that's been split...
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The wood devices were eventually replaced when engineers from Ancient Rome improved the design and began using iron and bronze which provided a...
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