How a piano works

How does a piano and keyboard work?

The way a piano works is you press a key on the piano, it then lifts a damper allowing the hammer to hit the string. This creates a sound via the vibrations coming from the string of the piano. A grand piano will have pedals whereas a keyboard will not have pedals. There are three pedals on a grand piano and they are:

The sustaining pedal
The sostenuto pedal
The una corda pedal

The sustaining pedal will lift all the dampers allowing you to play and key on the piano without pressing and holding the key. The pedal acts like a reverb. This means that when you press a key on the piano and step on the sustaining pedal the sound will still be heard for a longer amount of time.

The sostenuto pedal lifts a the dampers on the middle of the piano. This means that you can press any key on the middle section on the piano and it will create a reverb whereas if you wanted to press a key in the right section of the piano you will need to press and hold the key to get some reverb. The sostenuto pedal is very similar to the sustaining pedal. The sustaining pedal lifts all the dampers on the piano whereas the sostenuto pedal lifts only the dampers on the middle section of the piano.

The una corda pedal shifts the hammers a tiny bit to the right. This pedal can strike one string rather than all the strings while pressing the key on the piano. Una corda means one string in Italian. The unacorda pedal makes the sound of the piano lighter and smoother. This is what a una corda pedal does when you press a key on the piano.

Keyboards are very similar to pianos. A keyboard is an electronic instrument rather than a acoustic instrument. The keyboard will have different sounds and settings. This does include a grand piano sound. The way a keyboard work is you first plug a ac adapter into the socket of the keyboard and you plug the three pinned plug into a free socket. Once that is done you then power up the keyboard. Like a grand piano you press a key and make a sound via electronic pickups. The sounds from a keyboard could've been sampled or synthesized. Synthesis is when a sound is created and sampling is when a sound is recorded with a acoustic instrument.

If you want the key you pressed on the piano to last longer you can plug a portable pedal to the keyboard or if the keyboard has effect settings you can play about with settings until you find something that's suitable.