In (public) Suburb middle school I had a friend who played folk music as a hobby, and also made his own instruments. Mostly violin and hurdy-gurdy [1], probably because his parents were farmers in the suburb and owned a smith/wood workshop. His unique hobbies made him a bit of an outcast and people made fun of him in school, but I was in to classic music so we got along well.
A year or two later I changed school to a private school in the city who specialized in classic music, which was a drastically different environment; most of my classmates from then are professional musician.
It didn't work out for me that well in the end, but one good thing that came out of it was that I contacted him and suggested he also switch, which was a great life changing moment for him because everyone (including the dean) loved him because of his craftsmanship. Some people even commissioned instruments, at the age of 16.
It was surprising how happy & how fast he grew in his passion/hobby as soon as the environment changed from making fun of him to respecting the craft. There was only one school in the entire country that could give him that and by a coincidence he stumbled upon this, and to this day, almost 20 years later, enjoys that passion in the small community he found :)
Always wholesome whatever field, to see these people flourish rather than giving up their passion for conformity!
That's a touching story, and one thing that it highlights for me is that there will always be people that seem to relish pushing others down to their own level. That's such a frustrating thing.
It's also unfortunate that someone cool enough to make their own instruments would ever feel like a weirdo/outcast for it. The opposite should be true in the median high school.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not even sure you're less correct than I am. There sure are a lot of assholes around.
I'm just saying that in a story that goes "Things were bad, people helped and I worked hard, now things are good", it's sad getting stuck focusing on the first part.
That's an incredible story. Do you know where he is now? It would be great if he found some profession that played towards his unique set of interests.
I think he's a independent musician! Sometimes make woodwork, and instruments still, maybe more for hobby.
He still plays folk music, and regularly play at a Viking (Scandinavian) restaurant named Aifur in Stockholm. It's a cool restaurant worth visiting if you're going there one day =)
Aifur can be fun. Go with a small group if you can. If you're picked to do the "drink from a horn" contest, there's a trick to it. If you know the trick (and can shoot a beer), you'll win almost instantly. If I remember right, Glassbar ice cream a few steps away is pretty good.
If you're in Stockholm and interested in Viking things, take a trip to Birka. There's a ferry from Stockholm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birka
I was aware of this piano because of the Hyperion Knight recording and have always had an interest in 'one off' instruments, especially pianos. But I never caught on to this amazing story of how it came to be, the mixture of constraints, determination, inspiration and generosity working all out to result in this incredible creation.
To 'build a piano' is no simple undertaking, even if you already have a lot of shop knowledge tools and instrument knowledge. I've rebuilt one that was neglected and that already required a ton of knowledge and I've made some (technically minor) modifications to existing instruments[1]. That doesn't begin to put me in a position where I would attempt to build a piano from first principles. All the parts have to collaborate just so to get a working instrument and the history of the piano is littered with failures. To see a one off made by a young man like this is impressive already. But to see one at this level of quality, that's something else entirely, I have no words to really express how impressed that leaves me.
Thank you KolmogorovComp for posting this, it really makes my day (and my week, probably).
There's quite a lot of discussion about how it was made (which is pretty interesting, and impressive for a 15 year old!) but not very much discussion about the results.
My understanding is that it has a normal range of notes, but with a different type of string - is that true? Or can it go lower than a normal piano? How is the experience of playing it? Is it the same? Or does it respond differently (eg a different relationship between key force and sound). I guess as a complete piano novice my question is why would you want this over a normal piano?
The difference is reduced inharmonicity in the bass notes.
A sound we hear as a single pitch is made from multiple different sine waves playing simultaneously, called "partials" in general, or "harmonics" when those sine waves are integer[0] multiples of the lowest frequency, which is called the "fundamental".
In an string instrument, the ends of the strings are fixed in place. This means any standing wave in the string must have "nodes" (points where the wave has zero amplitude) at the ends. When you pluck or strike the string, you induce multiple different standing waves at once. In a mathematically ideal string (modeled with zero thickness), these standing waves are sine waves. Because the ends are always nodes, and because nodes and anti-nodes (points of maximum amplitude) of a sine wave are evenly distributed along the length of the wave, there will always be an integer number of anti-nodes. The frequency of the wave is proportional to the number of anti-nodes, so you end up with a harmonic sound, where the upper partials are integer multiples of the fundamental. Music played in standard Western tuning sounds the most consonant when it uses harmonic sounds.
But a real string instrument is not mathematically perfect. The strings have thickness, which makes them resist bending. Higher frequencies cause sharper bending of the string, so they are more affected by the bending resistance. This results in a standing wave that's very close to a sine wave, but with the end nodes shifted slightly towards the center of the string. The higher harmonics are effectively played on shorter strings, so their frequency is increased. They are no longer integer multiples of the fundamental, so the sound is "inharmonic".
Bass strings are typically thicker, so this effect is most noticeable in the bass. It's a big enough problem in a traditional piano that a special tuning technique ("stretched tuning") is used to try to hide it, but it still results in a kind of muddy/blurred sound. The only alternative to making the bass strings thicker is to make them longer, which is what the the Alexander piano does. The result is an unusual clarity in the bass.
[0] In practice people use "harmonics" to mean approximately integer multiples too.
As I understand it from my own tuning career, octave stretching is more about correcting dissonances that result from equal temperament than correcting anything about the dynamics of a physical piano. When you tune with octave stretching, you will also widen the high octaves, which are the correct size to hold a standing wave on almost every piano with standard "piano wire" strings. This helps to bring the 2nd overtone of a string more in line with the note a 12th above at a cost of making the 1st and 3rd overtone (one and two octaves up) slightly imperfect.
On the lower, wound strings, the thickness of the string causes the string to also hold a standing wave at the fundamental frequency in the short length that the string has, but it amplifies the higher-order harmonics and adds some secondary effects that cause the note to be less "clean" sounding. It doesn't cause the frequency to change.
By the way, I am not a fan of octave stretching on my own piano, so I usually ask piano tuners not to do it. It's completely optional.
I don't believe that's it. The problem of tuning higher notes to the stretched harmonics of lower notes would still be present even in a piano tuned using just intonation.
Suppose for instance the 2nd harmonic of C2 is 2 cents sharp of where it "ought" to be (which is twice the frequency of C2 itself). Then if you tune C3 (the C in the next octave) to be similarly 2 cents sharp of where it ought to be, it will not clash against the 2nd harmonic in C2 -- but the result is that the distance from C2 to C3 is a little more than an octave.
(I don't know whether 2 cents is anywhere ballpark -- I've studied the theory but haven't performed measurements.)
Incidentally, if you want to play microtonal music on an equally tuned piano, this is an argument for selecting a sharp system, such as 27-edo or 58-edo -- that is, a system whose approximations to the harmonics you're interested in are sharps. (12-edo gives an approximation 2 cents flat of the 3rd harmonic and 14 cents sharp of the 5th harmonic. It ignores the other harmonics. 27-edo gives a sharp approximation to harmonics 3, 5 and 7. 58-edo gives a sharp approximation to 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13 -- nirvana, as far as I'm concerned.)
While it is true that the harmonics will be off for any tuning system, octave stretching is relatively new and arises only on equal tempered instruments because it needs to be applied equally to every note, so it sounds terrible if you apply it to unequal tunings where (for example) the distance between C2 and G3 can be 20 cents different than the distance between C#2 and G#3.
In equal temperament, the distance is ~2 cents between the 2nd harmonic of C2 and G3 (and every other pair a 12th apart), so stretching an octave by ~1 cent spreads that distance out while being pretty much imperceptible. In a decent quarter-comma tuning system like Werckmeister (a very common Baroque tuning), four of the 5ths are off by about 5 cents, and the others are pure. As a result, the 2nd harmonic differs from the note a 12th above by a variable amount. Stretching every octave by 2.5 cents to balance this becomes very much audible across a keyboard, and sounds very odd on the harmonic series' that are nearly perfect.
Baroque tunings also pay a lot of attention to the major 3rd (the 4th harmonic), which is a notable weakness of equal temperament - it is far too narrow.
Regardless, octave stretching doesn't have to do with piano dynamics, it has to do with tuning systems.
As I understand it, stretched tuning in a piano is specifically intended to compensate for inharmonicity, not to compensate for the weaknesses of equal temperament. You can apply stretch to unevenly tempered pianos too, and it should also make those sound better. A formal description of stretched piano tuning is relatively recent (1938, with Railsback's publication of his eponymous curve), but some kind of stretched tuning likely goes back to the first piano, as it happens automatically if you tune the piano against itself by ear.
12-edo's approximation to the 5th harmonic (a.k.a. 4th overtone) is 14 cents sharp, not flat -- it's at 400 cents plus two octaves, whereas the 5th harmonic is at 386 cents plus two octaves.
I admit to being unfamiliar with unequal temperaments. As a jazz player they seems like a complete bummer to me, as I love to transpose on a whim and don't want the intervallic structure to depend on what key I'm in.
Yeah, I had a sign error in my head there (unequal major thirds are the relatively flat ones).
I know that there is some unequal tempered jazz out there from very early recordings, and I assume they thought the different character of the keys added extra character and possibly some extra "grunge," but it would be interesting to compare the improvisational style to equal tempered jazz.
I know of at least one person who's very fond of a 12-tone JI scale she came up with, which she happily plays in every key. She tattooed it onto her arm.
I've played in 58-edo, which to me is basically indistinguishable from JI. It's just a little too big to use comfortably on the Lumatone. I can use it on the monome comfortably, but the monome doesn't have velocity sensitivity, which for me is a deal killer. On the Lumatone the biggest I feel comfortable playing is 46-edo. Fortunately, 46-edo sounds incredible.
It doesn't have the best approximation to 5/4 -- it's 5 cents sharp -- but that error goes in the same direction as the error in 12-edo that we're used to, so (because we're all used to 12-edo) it sounds world better than, say, the 5/4 that 41-edo gives you, which is 6 cents flat.
There are some videos at the bottom where it is played. It sounds beautiful. The range is like a normal 88 key piano, no extra keys but what matters is the difference in timbre in the low notes. Your 'regular' piano has what is called an overwound string, a steel string that is covered with one or two layers of copper. This results in a string that sounds less pure. The Alexander piano is special in that it uses no overwound strings, all the bass notes are simply simplex strings at their natural length without added weight to reduce their period of oscillation. It also has a huge soundboard, so presumably it is quite loud, but the main difference is in how the bases sound.
I listened to the Clara Schumann piece and I thought the low notes have a "perfectly tinny" sound, as if they were computer-generated on MATLAB. Or like a harpsichord. I assume that's the difference?
I wouldn't call it tinny, I would call the alternative 'muddy'. It's a much more pure tone than you would get from a 'normal' bass string (which is actually quite a complex piece by itself).
FWIW I've noticed that "rattling" (which I think I hear in the Liszt Funerailles video) in some K-pop videos featuring electronic low bass at the ~40Hz level. I think it might be natural and not an artifact or flaw.
for string instruments, there are optimal ranges for string-length, tension and thickness that vary with its frequency. Which is why for example a violin has shorter strings than a cello or a contra bass. Similarly, acoustic (non-electric) bass guitars don't work so well, etc.
To my understanding in a piano, the lower strings are "too short", this includes grand pianos at a concert hall for example. There is a compromise in the construction. The Alexander Piano has an adequate length of strings, so in principle it has better sounds in the lower frequency ranges.
This run from high to low, from The Great Gate of Kiev, the finale of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, illustrates the artistic problem that the Alexander piano is trying to solve:
At the top, the notes are easily identifiable, but near the end the pitch gets increasingly murky.
The damage to the artistic intent by the limitations of the instrumental technology is substantial in this Mussorgsky passage because you can’t discern the implied harmony nearly as well as the composer could have imagined it in their head.
I would love to hear this run on the Alexander. (Or all of The Great Gate of Kiev for that matter — with its big broad chords spanning the keyboard it’s ideally suited to this instrument.)
It also possible to use the murkiness of the piano’s low end as an artistic device. Here’s a Bartok passage (from Out of Doors) where the low notes are effectively percussion strikes and what matters is that the final note is “lower”, not that it has a distinct pitch which fits into a harmonic plan:
Conversely, if composers knew of the Alexander piano's existence they may have written specifically for it taking advantage of the bass' clarity.
I just heard the Liszt Funerailles played on the Alexander piano (YouTube on the embedded main page), and yes it sounds very unusually melodic in the bass.
It does, but pianos can go lower than the bass. Bass guitars typically bottom out around E1, 5 and 7 strings may go lower but typically bottom out around B1 or G0. Pianos go to A0, about 7.5 hz above the bottom of human hearing.
These lower notes are the "muddy" ones, and since pianos have a tough time cleanly making those notes, then it would also mean that bass guitars would, too. Most 7 string guitars only play about a perfect 4th or a perfect 5th below standard tuning because of this inescapable muddiness, and the other extra strings tune upward into the low range of the guitar instead.
Aside from that, it wouldn't matter anyway as guitar instruments are inherently "loose" in their tuning. They may be perfect at the open string and 12th fret if they are properly set up and intonated, but every note in between will be off by a small amount.
Further, the act of fretting and plucking the instrument changes the tone of the generated note, specifically, where and how you strike the string to generate the note changes the overtones, and where and how hard you depress the string behind the fret causes minute shifts in the pitch of the string, not to mention that even minor bending of the string due to hand anatomy and grip pattern will also cause the pitch to change.
Two players can mechanically play the same piece on the same instrument in the same way down to the microsecond, but no matter how accurate they are, there will be detectable differences in the resulting piece.
A piano doesn't have that. You have your three pedals and how hard you depress the key. Still a lot of control over the sound, but if two different pianists play the same piece on the same piano with the same pedal work and finger strength, the results should be essentially identical.
Therefore, the sound quality of the piano is fixed and set based on its original setup and the string lengths it is given, whereas a guitar player can compensate for low level muddiness by altering the playing pattern, striking closer to the bridge with a plectrum or their nails, whatever they need to do to put some brightness into a low note, whereas the piano player only has the option of striking harder or softer, so in the range where a bass and piano compete, the bass can have much less muddiness than a piano.
Native Instruments have sample packs of two extraordinary pianos - the one "una corda" only has single strings for every note, the other is a massive upright piano just like this one, with exceptionally long strings called "the Giant"
>Fifteen year old me said “Mum I’m going to build a piano!”
This part is just amazing to me. I can't remember what I was doing when I was 15, but it sure as heck was nothing as close to wanting to build a freaking piano.
I built my tube amplifier (along with some effects pedals) for my electric guitar at 17.
Now that I have kids, I wonder how my folks let me work with 400V of electricity and not freak out. Makes me wonder what kind of weird things my kids are going to get into.
I built my stereo at age 12, then followed it up with a (much larger) bass amplifier for my bass guitar when I was 14, and a mixer/effects box at 15. Of course they linked together, using the bass amplifier as a sub-woofer. I didn't have to deal with as high a voltage as you, just the 240V mains supply, and then the +-70V supply to the bass amp circuitry.
I think kids these days are much more likely to do something digital than build things like this from discrete components.
Indeed, and I consider that to be a huge loss. Real world skills are important skills. Just as important as digital skills but financially we seem to think otherwise.
Just a rectifier and a cap and you're there from regular household current (not safe without galvanic isolation!!). But with a simple transformer you can go way higher. Some of the end stages on tube systems I had when I was a kid would sit at 500V when idling (EL44).
Usually as soon as you see a tube with a cap on top you know you have something pretty high voltage.
No, mains runs at 230V in Europe, but as said by sibling comments, after the power transformer and rectification, HT1 (the primary high tension power bus, usually feeding the tubes in the power section) can get in the 300-500V range in some amp designs.
I knew from schematics and calculations it'd be about this high, but seeing the actual 400V value on my cheap multimeter sent shivers down my spine. Also I remember accidentally shorting the wrong wires while taking a measurement and blowing a fuse. Fun times!
In middle school, ~13 years old or so, one of my classmates set himself a goal of using shop class to make himself a guitar, wasn't half bad either. I regret that I didn't pick up the woodworking bug until later, I have made tables and bedframes and shelves now but still never got around to trying to make my own guitar. Occasionally I get jealous when I see folks with microtonal fretboards.
When I was 16 I made an electric guitar, sort of. Mostly I was interested in making a pickup from scratch. The entire guitar was literal garbage, picture wire, fridge magnet some steel dowel I cut up for the cores. The tensionera were threaded hose clamps cut open. It only had four strings so I tuned it like a ukelele. No frets though, so it sounded bad. Amd the pencil sharpener motor didn't have that much wire so I had to turn the volume way up.
I have been wondering lately what a pickup wound with wire made of lk-99 would sound like. SQUIDs for pickups...
I helped a friend make his. He got this insanely hard piece of wood for the neck and we spent a good couple of days shaping that. I'm pretty sure that if you were to look closely at that attic today you'd find that dust unchanged, that wood will never rot. It was also very heavy, a small off-cut would not float. I have no idea where he got that wood, I really should ask him because that probably makes for an interesting story but we rarely are in contact today. 42 years later and he's still into music. I wonder if he still has it.
Very badly. In fact all my normal (woodworking) tools went blunt without much progress. Eventually we settled on doing it like this: use a very thin saw to mark out the stations every 2 cm or so for depth + 1 mm, then use a belt sander (graciously borrowed to us by the father of a friend) to take it down to the marks, then endless hand sanding until it was good. It looked absolutely gorgeous when it was done. I don't remember what kind of wood it was though, the amount of dust was staggering. On one day I accidentally left the door to my attic bedroom open and everything inside was covered in dust. That beltsander did a great job though, and I don't think we'd have pulled that off without it.
If I had to do this today I'd use a metalworking mill. There is no point in trying to work wood that hard with regular wood tools, they just won't keep an edge.
The only thing I can think of is player comfort. I imagine that huge soundboard is extra loud. Best to not place it directly in front of the player's face.
A kiwi in a shed is nigh unstoppable. I have no idea why that's a national stereotype (maybe manufactured goods took a long time to replace for an agricultural/pastoral economy?) but it's pretty cool as national stereotypes go.
“There is a powerful driving force inside every human being that, once unleashed, can make any vision, dream, or desire a reality.” Tony Robbins
This is what it means to follow your dreams! A wonderful mother, supported the desire of her son. I would like to listen to Elton John playing on this instrument and to know his opinion.
You could at least ask his keys player, ha! There's a pic of him down the page.
I studied music in Dunedin at the University of Otago and never heard of this. Interesting seeing some of the people associated with the music dept. in the pics. Amazing work!
I can only hope some of the excellent classical recording engineers in NZ have caught wind of this by now and made some of their own recordings. Without wanting to sound too snobby, while his recordings are good as archival evidence it would be great to hear what a real pro with all the standard classical recording equipment could capture (for the uninitiated: better mics and hardware and a lifetime's experience using it can do wonders with audio).
From what I recall after chatting to Adrian around 2014, he couldn't get Elton to play on it because Elton was under contract to play with Yamaha-only pianos or something like that.
For what it’s worth I’ve got a trained ear (trained musician, brief career as a mastering engineer) and the bass notes on these recordings sound freakishly distinct in pitch (identifiable, “tight”, “not boomy”).
It’s similar to the difference between an electric bass guitar and an acoustic bass.
Or more to the point, it’s one notch further in bass note clarity on a scale from small upright piano to baby grand piano to concert grand piano… to the Alexander piano.
I expect that a Fourier analysis of bass notes struck in isolation comparing piano types would reveal increasing proportions of fundamental to side frequencies, with the Alexander having the highest ratio.
Yes. I've looked at what a 1.80 grand puts out in the lows and it is really quite muddy from a spectral perspective. You can still tell the pitches apart but there is a lot of smearing and the harmonics are, especially when you look at the high end, all over the place.
That quality, though it may seem a bit unreal, has benefits in terms of revealing musical gestures that would otherwise be obscured. (See my link to the Mussorgsky passage elsethread.)
Speaking as an audio engineer, we are always fighting to achieve this kind of transparency.
I have found that there are many aspects and dimensions to listening.
For instance, I am now comfortable hearing very subtle nuance in musical performance, in particular piano performance. Meanwhile, my dad is an audiophile and not musically trained but can hear a whole world of detail when assessing sound scrapes and equalisation. I brought him along to help me choose a digital piano and was humbled by how many things he could hear that were inaudible to me.
A friend of a friend was studying audio engineering and he recorded me playing the piano for a some coursework and the things he was focused on like acoustics, colour, fidelity and things like the very subtle hiss again were very different things I am used to listening out for.
Podcasters will talk about the BBC sound as being the gold standard and while I can tell good from bad I can't internalise what makes a broadcast have a good or bad sound....
Meanwhile back to topic, I've gone piano shopping with professional pianists and they can hear so much more than I can. I love watching videos by this channel on the subject: https://youtube.com/@RobertsPianos
"Listening to brass through a recording is like photocopying a steak and eating the copy"
Some accoustic properties just can't be properly captured through microphones that aren't perfectly selected and reproduced through speakers engineered for the specific recording
This is true especially for the low end (without prohibitively expensive 18"+ drivers and a near flawless accoustic environment to minimise standing waves and any other issues etc)
If you don't know what to expect then you probably should hear it side-by-side with a regular piano to pick up on the differences, that's much easier than to hear it being played because the effect is subtle enough that if you're not paying attention you will likely just think 'nice bass' and leave it at that.
No degree here, but I spend a lot of time doing sound design and love low frequencies and I agree completely. Those bass notes just cut through the mix and are so delightfully zingy. It's so much easier to hear the pitch on them. It's an amazing sounding instrument.
Reminds me of Stuart & Sons, a company from across the Tasman, with their impressive 108 key Piano
On a side note: can any piano experts chime in on why it seems impossible to DIY electric pianos in the same way?
I'd love to see some experimental Rhodes, Wurlitzers or Hohner Pianet derivatives. The only successful ones seem to be the even more conservative Vintage Vibes and Rhodes MK8.
I'd love to see the same DIY community grow around electric pianos as it has electric guitars and synths for the last 60+ years
> can any piano experts chime in on why it seems impossible to DIY electric pianos in the same way
It's absolutely doable, go for it!
It's been on my 'to do' list for ages, to build my own but I realize how much time it would take and what I'd need in terms of tooling just to produce a serviceable action. So it will probably never happen. But there are zero obstacles to doing this if you are dedicated, have the space, the skills and the funds.
In the early renaissance period they didn't know how to make wound strings so they had long strings like this on instruments. The Theorbo is one. A nice video below
I don’t recall ever getting a conclusive answer on if it sounded any good. I remember a video a while ago of various musicians playing it but it omitted any kind of feedback. It sounded fine for a YouTube video.
Had the pleasure of meeting Adrian around 2014 when he was showcasing his piano in Hamilton, NZ. All around a great guy (thanks for the birthday cake!). Still awed by how he pulled it off with essentially no experience!
I'm kinda shocked by the pictures near the bottom of it being moved, including one where it's lifted by ... a tractor with a loader fork? Or loaded onto an open trailer?
“There is a powerful driving force inside every human being that, once unleashed, can make any vision, dream, or desire a reality.” Tony Robbins
This is what it means to follow your dreams! A wonderful mother, supported the desire of her son. I would like to listen to Elton John playing such an instrument and hear his opinion.
In (public) Suburb middle school I had a friend who played folk music as a hobby, and also made his own instruments. Mostly violin and hurdy-gurdy [1], probably because his parents were farmers in the suburb and owned a smith/wood workshop. His unique hobbies made him a bit of an outcast and people made fun of him in school, but I was in to classic music so we got along well.
A year or two later I changed school to a private school in the city who specialized in classic music, which was a drastically different environment; most of my classmates from then are professional musician.
It didn't work out for me that well in the end, but one good thing that came out of it was that I contacted him and suggested he also switch, which was a great life changing moment for him because everyone (including the dean) loved him because of his craftsmanship. Some people even commissioned instruments, at the age of 16.
It was surprising how happy & how fast he grew in his passion/hobby as soon as the environment changed from making fun of him to respecting the craft. There was only one school in the entire country that could give him that and by a coincidence he stumbled upon this, and to this day, almost 20 years later, enjoys that passion in the small community he found :)
Always wholesome whatever field, to see these people flourish rather than giving up their passion for conformity!
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurdy-gurdy