CELLO

The cello (pron.: /ˈtʃɛloʊ/ CHEL-oh; plural cellos or celli) is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin and viola.
The cello is used as a solo instrument, as well as in chamber music ensembles, string orchestras, and as a member of the string section of symphony orchestras. It is the second-largest bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, the double bass being the largest.
Cellos were derived from other mid- to large-sized bowed instruments in the 16th century, such as the viola da gamba, and the generally smaller and squarer viola da braccio, and such instruments made by members of the Amati family of luthiers. The invention of wire-wrapped strings in Bologna gave the cello greater versatility. By the 18th century, the cello had largely replaced other mid-sized bowed instruments.
The name cello is an abbreviation of the Italian violoncello, which means "little violone", referring to the violone ("big viol"), the lowest-pitched instrument of the viol family, the group of string instruments that went out of fashion around the end of the 17th century in most countries except France, where they survived another half-century or so before the louder violin family came into greater favour in that country too. In modern symphonies, it is the second largest stringed instrument after the bass. Thus, the name cello carries both an augmentative "-one" ("big") and a diminutive "-cello" ("little"). By the turn of the 20th century, it had grown customary to abbreviate the name violoncello to 'cello, with the apostrophe indicating the six missing prefix letters. It is now customary to use the name "cello" without the apostrophe and as a full designation. The word derives ultimately from vitula, meaning a stringed instrument.

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VIOLIN

The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which also includes the viola and cello.
The violin is sometimes informally called a fiddle, regardless of the type of music played on it. The word violin comes from the Medieval Latin word vitula, meaning stringed instrument; this word is also believed to be the source of the Germanic "fiddle". The violin, while it has ancient origins, acquired most of its modern characteristics in 16th-century Italy, with some further modifications occurring in the 18th and 19th centuries. Violinists and collectors particularly prize the instruments made by the Gasparo da Salò, Giovanni Paolo Maggini, Stradivari, Guarneri and Amati families from the 16th to the 18th century in Brescia and Cremona and by Jacob Stainer in Austria. Great numbers of instruments have come from the hands of "lesser" makers, as well as still greater numbers of mass-produced commercial "trade violins" coming from cottage industries in places such as Saxony, Bohemia, and Mirecourt. Many of these trade instruments were formerly sold by Sears, Roebuck and Co. and other mass merchandisers.
A violin generally consists of a spruce top (the soundboard, also known as the top plate, table, or belly), maple ribs and back, two endblocks, a neck, a bridge, a soundpost, four strings, and various fittings, optionally including a chinrest, which may attach directly over, or to the left of, the tailpiece. A distinctive feature of a violin body is its hourglass-like shape and the arching of its top and back. The hourglass shape comprises two upper bouts, two lower bouts, and two concave C-bouts at the waist, providing clearance for the bow.
The voice of a violin depends on its shape, the wood it is made from, the graduation (the thickness profile) of both the top and back, and the varnish that coats its outside surface. The varnish and especially the wood continue to improve with age, making the fixed supply of old violins much sought-after.
The very great majority of glued joints in the instrument use animal hide glue for a number of reasons: it is capable of making a thinner joint than most other glues, it is reversible (brittle enough to crack with carefully applied force, and removable with warm water) when disassembly is needed, and since fresh hide glue sticks to old hide glue, more original wood can be preserved when repairing a joint. (More modern glues must be cleaned off entirely for the new joint to be sound, which generally involves scraping off some wood along with the old glue.) Weaker, diluted glue is usually used to fasten the top to the ribs, and the nut to the fingerboard, since common repairs involve removing these parts.

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GRAND PIANO

In grand pianos, the frame and strings are horizontal, with the strings extending away from the keyboard. The action lies beneath the strings, and uses gravity as its means of return to a state of rest.
There are many sizes of grand piano. A rough generalization distinguishes the concert grand (between 2.2 and 3 metres long, about 7–10 feet) from the parlor grand or boudoir grand (1.7 to 2.2 metres long, about 6–7 feet) and the smaller baby grand (around 1.5 metres (5 feet)).
All else being equal, longer pianos with longer strings have larger, richer sound and lower inharmonicity of the strings. Inharmonicity is the degree to which the frequencies of overtones (known as partials or harmonics) sound sharp relative to whole multiples of the fundamental frequency. This results from the piano's considerable string stiffness; as a struck string decays its harmonics vibrate, not from their termination, but from a point very slightly toward the center (or more flexible part) of the string. The higher the partial, the further sharp it runs. Pianos with shorter and thicker string (i.e. small pianos with short string scales) have more inharmonicity. The greater the inharmonicity, the more the ear perceives it as harshness of tone.
Inharmonicity requires that octaves be stretched, or tuned to a lower octave's corresponding sharp overtone rather than to a theoretically correct octave. If octaves are not stretched, single octaves sound in tune, but double—and notably triple—octaves are unacceptably narrow. Stretching a small piano's octaves to match its inherent inharmonicity level creates an imbalance among all the instrument's intervallic relationships, not just its octaves. In a concert grand, however, the octave "stretch" retains harmonic balance, even when aligning treble notes to a harmonic produced from three octaves below. This lets close and widespread octaves sound pure, and produces virtually beatless perfect fifths. This gives the concert grand a brilliant, singing and sustaining tone quality—one of the principal reasons that full-size grands are used in the concert hall. Smaller grands satisfy the space and cost needs of domestic use.

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RHODES PIANO

The Rhodes piano's tone-generating principles are derived from the concept of an asymmetrical tuning fork, with a stiff wire (called a "tine"), struck by a felt-tipped (neoprene rubber-tipped after 1970) hammer, acting as one side of the tuning fork, and a counterbalancing resonating tone bar above the tine acting as the other side. This tone generator kit's vibrations are then picked up by an electromagnetic pickup (one for each tine), and amplified. The pickups' output is (on a Stage-model) fed through a volume and a tone potentiometer on the namerail, and then to an output for external amplification.

The sound produced has a bell-like character not unlike a vibraphone, celesta or glockenspiel. Because the instrument produces sound electrically, the signal can be processed to yield many different timbral colors. On the Suitcase model the signal is processed through a "StereoVibrato", a low-frequency pan oscillation (actually a tremolo, but Leo Fender insisted on calling it vibrato, like on his amplifiers) effects unit, which pans the signal back and forth between right and left channels. It is this "rounded" or chiming sound that is called the classic Rhodes sound, which can be heard on, for example, many of Stevie Wonder's or Herbie Hancock's songs. The preamp with vibrato was included on the original Fender Rhodes Electric Pianos and after 1970 (with stereo panning) on the "suitcase" models; the "stage" models lack the preamp and the amplified speaker cabinet, but can be retrofitted.

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HYDRAULUS

The term may be applied based on the interface used to play the instrument, in which a player blocks the flow of water through a particular hole in order to sound a particular note, or based on a hydraulic sound production mechanism. Hydraulophones use water flow sound producing mechanisms. They have a user interface, which is blocking water jets to produce sound. Those described in Mann's paper Hydraulophone design considerations use water jets striking perforated spinning disks, shafts, or valves, to create a pulsating water flow, similar to a siren disk. A single disk, shaft, or valve assembly can have rings or passages with different numbers of holes for different notes. Some hydraulophones have reeds (one or more reed for each finger hole) and some are reedless, having one or more fipple mechanism associated with each finger hole, thus having no moving parts to wear out.
Blocking flow through a finger hole directs the water instead to one or more of the above-described sound-production mechanisms, or resulting changes in flow or pressure affect a separate sounding mechanism associated with each finger hole.
Some hydraulophones include an underwater hydrophone pickup to allow the sounds produced by the water to be electrically amplified. Electric amplification allows effects to be added (as with an electric guitar) as well as making the hydraulophone a hyper-acoustic instrument (that is, using computation to change the acoustic sound of the water into some other instrument).

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ORCHESTRION

An orchestrion is a generic name for a machine that plays music and is designed to sound like an orchestra or band. Orchestrions may be operated by means of a large pinned cylinder or by a music roll and less commonly book music. The sound is usually produced by pipes, though they will be voiced differently to those found in a pipe organ, as well as percussion instruments. Many orchestrions contain a piano as well.

1918 Seeburg Orchestrion, "Style G" located at Clark's Trading Post in Lincoln, New Hampshire. Uses a 10-song music roll and plays multiple wind, string, and percussion instruments.

The first known automatic playing orchestrion was the panharmonicon, invented in 1805 by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel. Friedrich Wilhelm Kaufmann copied this automatic playing machine in 1808 and his family produced orchestrions from that time on. One of Mälzel's panharmonicons was sent to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1811 and was exhibited there and then in New York and other cities. Mälzel also was on tour (with interruptions) with this instrument in the United States from 7 February 1826 until he died in 1838. In 1817 Flight & Robson in London built a similar automatic instrument called Apollonicon and in 1823 William M. Goodrich copied Mälzel's panharmonicon in Boston, USA.
The name "orchestrion" has also been applied to three specific musical instruments:

1. A chamber organ, designed by Abt Vogler in 1785, which in a space of 9 cubic feet (250 dm³) contained no less than 900 pipes, 3 manuals of 63 keys each and 39 pedals.
2. A pianoforte with organ pipes attached, invented by Thomas Anton Kunz (1756–1830) of Prague in 1791. This orchestrion comprised two manuals of 65 keys and 25 pedals, all of which could be used either independently or coupled. There were 21 stops, 230 strings and 360 pipes which produced 105 different combinations. The bellows were worked either by hand or by machinery.
3. A mechanical musical instrument, automatically played by means of revolving cylinders, invented in 1851 by F. T. Kaufmann of Dresden. It comprises a complete wind orchestra, with the addition of kettle-drums, side drums, cymbals, tambourine and triangle

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CONTINUUM FINGERBOARD

The Continuum features a touch-sensitive neoprene playing surface measuring approximately 19 centimetres (7.5 in) high by either 137 centimetres (54 in) long for a full-size instrument, or 72 centimetres (28 in) long for a half-size instrument. The surface allows a pitch range of 9350 cents (about 7.79 octaves) for the full-size instrument, and 4610 cents (about 3.84 octaves) for the half-size instrument. The instrument has a response time of 1.33 ms.
Sensors under the playing surface respond to finger position and pressure in three dimensions and provide pitch resolution of one cent along the length of the scale (the X dimension), allowing essentially continuous pitch control for portamento effects and notes that are not in the chromatic scale, and allowing for the application of vibrato or pitch bend to a note. A software "rounding" feature enables pitch to be quantized to the notes of a traditional equal-tempered scale, just scale or other scale to facilitate in-tune performance, with the amount and duration of the "rounding" controllable in real time.

An illustration of the Continuum Fingerboard's axes.

The Continuum also provides two additional parameters for the sound: it is able to transmit the finger pressure on the board as a MIDI value, as well as the finger's vertical position on the key. These parameters are independently programmable; a standard configuration is where position on the X-Axis (lengthwise) on the instrument corresponds to pitch, position on the Y-Axis (widthwise) corresponds to a timbre shift, and position on the Z-Axis (vertically) corresponds to a change in amplitude. The Continuum is capable of polyphonic performance, with up to 16 simultaneous voices.
Each recent revision has brought more features and sound diversity to the internal synthesizer in the Continuum Fingerboard. As such, the instrument is starting to be both a controller and a stand alone instrument.

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