Keyboards
A keyboard is nothing more than 77 or 88 white and black keys arranged in the 5+7 pattern that most people are familiar with:
5 -
- White - black - white - black - white
7 -
- White - black - white - black - white - black - white
Pianos
Pianos have Keyboards; however what makes a piano a piano is the arrangement of strings, hammers, and dampeners inside the body of the instrument. Each individual key is linked to a hammer or some other means of engagement which in turn has its own string to strike. In short, what we're using as the defining characteristic to separate these instruments from synthesizers is that each key on the keyboard has its own sound generator - whether that be a string that's vibrating because it's been hit by a hammer, or (in the case of the mellotron) whether it's some tape with a pre-recorded loops sound that being pressed against a tape head.
Popular Piano Types
- Grand Piano
- Baby Grand Piano
- Upright Piano
- Fender Rhodes Electric Piano
- Hofner Electric Piano (Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter")
- Mellotron
Synthesizers
A synthesizer is an electronic device - that can be digital or analog. This electronic device is made up of 4 different kinds of sound devices.
- Amplifiers,
- Envelope Generators,
- Filters,
- Oscillators
Oscillators create the sound waves. Filters modify the sound waves that the oscillators make. Oscillators can be stacked to create "more musical" sounds.
A synthesizer may or may not have a keyboard - but a synthesizer will have various controls for creating a waveform on the oscillators, and shaping that waveform with the filters. The earliest synthesizers were monophonic - they could only create one sound at a time. Today's synthesizers are much smaller than the original (and most notable) Moog synthesizers of the late 1960s. Ironically, Bob Moog (pronounced "Mohg") was trying to build sound generators that were smaller, more inexpensive, more portable, and more reliable than the early synths that were powered with vacuum tubes.
A synthesizer is called such because with the use of only those four sound devices, just about any sound that is made conventionally, can be mimicked (if not entirely accurately) in electronics. The sound is synthetic: it's not the result of a natural source of vibration.
Popular Synthesizer Types
Quite possibly the most ambitious use of the original monotone Moog Synthesizer is from Wendy Carlos' "Switched on Bach". What makes Switched on Bach so amazing is that in order to get chords, Wendy had to record each individual note that would make up a chord from the synthesizer, and then mix all the tones together so as to get the correct expression and performance of the original Bach pieces. Today with digital audio workstations, this isn't such a daunting task. Wendy originally did all this recording and mixing on reel-to-reel tape - the recording medium that was available at that time...
- Sources
