Musical Instrument Blog #1

Piano/Thumb Piano

When looking into the instrument I wished to play I thought that making a simple small piano would be easy. It's just a box with strings and keys you press that hit the corresponding string. While doing light research I noticed it was actually very difficult to piece something like that together. Then a friend of mine happened across an instrument called a thumb piano. It sounded like the perfect thing to make. So when i got home I looked it up. Basically its a bunch of different sized metal pieces that are bend in the middle and held down. It's played my pressing down on a metal piece and then releasing it causing a sharp crisp sound to be produced. The number of pieces can be varied so the range of notes is easily acquired like an actual piano. Its shape can be a small box with metal strips on top and a piece of wood that acts as like a ditch above the box like board. The metal strips are places strategically on top of the wooden ditch and then a bar is placed across them and pressed down to bend the metal pieces in a out wide U shape. I'm not sure about how tuning takes place but the vibrations of the metal to metal makes the nice sound.

To see for yourself check out this youtube video.