49 Fun Facts About Musical Instruments

How many keys does a standard modern piano have?

A standard modern piano has 88 keys, 52 white and 36 black, running from A0 at the bottom up to C8.

Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the piano around 1700 while employed by the Medici as what?

Cristofori was Keeper of the Instruments for Prince Ferdinando de' Medici in Florence; his hammers struck the strings and fell back, letting the player control volume as a harpsichord could not.

Which piano maker's Imperial model has 97 keys instead of the usual number?

Bösendorfer's Imperial grand, model 290, has 97 keys; the nine extra bass keys are often coloured black so the pianist keeps their bearings.

The saxophone is made of brass, yet it belongs to which family of instruments?

The single-reed mouthpiece is what counts, not the metal. Belgian maker Adolphe Sax patented it on 28 June 1846, hoping to combine brass projection with woodwind agility.

The saxophone was patented in 1846 by an instrument maker from which country?

Adolphe Sax was born in Dinant, Belgium, in 1814 and settled in France, where he patented the saxophone in 1846 and spent years in lawsuits over it.

The four strings of a violin are tuned in which interval?

The violin's four strings are tuned in perfect fifths: G3, D4, A4 and E5 from lowest to highest, each a fifth above the last.

The 1721 'Lady Blunt' Stradivarius violin sold at auction in 2011 for roughly how much?

The Lady Blunt fetched $15.9 million (£9.8 million) at Tarisio in June 2011, sold by the Nippon Music Foundation to fund Japanese earthquake relief, then an auction record for a violin.

Roughly how many of Antonio Stradivari's instruments are known to survive?

About 650 of Stradivari's instruments survive, most of them violins, out of roughly 1,100 he made in his Cremona workshop; tree-ring dating traces their spruce tops to Alpine forests.

The theremin, invented in 1920, is unusual because it is played how?

It is played without touching it: two antennas sense the distance of the player's hands, one controlling pitch and the other volume.

What instrument actually plays the touchless-sounding electronic part on the Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations'?

The part was played on an Electro-Theremin, a slide-controlled instrument built by trombonist Paul Tanner that is far easier to play in tune than a true theremin.

Traditional didgeridoos are made from eucalyptus branches that have been hollowed out by what?

Termites hollow out the trunk by eating the dead heartwood and leaving the living sapwood; makers tap trunks to find ones already eaten through.

The Hawaiian word 'ukulele' roughly translates as what?

'Ukulele is usually glossed as 'jumping flea', from 'uku (flea) and lele (to jump), said to describe the player's quick, darting fingers.

The ukulele descends from small guitar-like instruments brought to Hawaii by immigrants from where?

Immigrants from Madeira, Portugal, landing on the Ravenscrag in 1879, brought the machete and rajão; Hawaiian makers turned them into the ukulele within a decade.

Which Roman emperor was described by Suetonius as a player of the tibia utricularis, an early bagpipe?

Suetonius wrote that Nero vowed to perform publicly as a utricularius, a bagpiper, near the end of his reign; Dio Chrysostom also mentions him playing a pipe with a bag under his arm.

Which instrument gives the orchestra its tuning note, a concert A?

The oboe sounds the tuning A because its pitch is hard to adjust, so everyone else tunes to it, and its penetrating tone carries to every desk.

The oldest known musical instruments, found in caves in Germany, are flutes made from what?

The Swabian Jura flutes are carved from griffon vulture wing bone and mammoth ivory; the Hohle Fels vulture-bone flute has five finger holes and dates to around 40,000 years ago.

The Fender Stratocaster, introduced in 1954, traditionally carries how many pickups?

The three single-coils and five-way switch, plus the contoured body, made it the template every rival copies. Hendrix, Clapton and Buddy Holly all played one.

The modern classical guitar's shape was settled around 1850 by makers from which country?

Antonio de Torres Jurado, working in Seville and later Almería in Spain, fixed the larger body and fan-braced top that every classical guitar since has copied.

What tune did the Gemini 6 astronauts play on harmonica and chimes in December 1965, the first instruments in space?

Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford played 'Jingle Bells' on a tiny harmonica and a string of small bells after deadpan-reporting a 'satellite' piloted by a man in a red suit; both are at the Smithsonian.

The dominant harmonica maker was founded in Trossingen in 1857 by a man in what trade?

Matthias Hohner, a clockmaker by trade, began making harmonicas in Trossingen in 1857, and within decades his firm was the world's largest harmonica maker.

The world's largest pipe organ, with 33,112 pipes, stands in a boardwalk hall in which New Jersey resort?

The Midmer-Losh organ in Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall was built between 1929 and 1932; its Grand Ophicleide stop reaches about 130 decibels, and a 1944 hurricane began decades of damage.

In Ctesibius's 3rd-century BC hydraulis, the first organ, what kept the air pressure steady?

Water pressure: hand pumps forced air into a chamber partly submerged in water, and the water's weight kept the wind pressure even, hence the name hydraulis, 'water pipe'.

In Hornbostel-Sachs classification, an instrument whose own body vibrates, like a triangle, is called what?

An idiophone's whole body vibrates to make the sound, as a triangle, xylophone or cymbal does; membranophones are drums, chordophones strings, aerophones winds.

The Hornbostel-Sachs system of classifying instruments was first published in which year?

Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs published their scheme in 1914 in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, modelling its numbered categories on the Dewey Decimal library system.

George Harrison played the sitar on which Beatles song, recorded in 1965?

Harrison played a sitar bought from a London shop on 'Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)', recorded in October 1965 for Rubber Soul; he began lessons with Ravi Shankar the next year.

Roughly how many strings, including sympathetic ones, can a sitar have in total?

A sitar carries eighteen to twenty-one strings: about six played strings over the frets and eleven to thirteen sympathetic strings beneath them that ring along.

How does a trumpet player actually produce the sound?

The buzz sets up a standing wave in the tubing. A standard B-flat trumpet has about 1.48 metres of it, and three valves add extra lengths to lower the pitch.

Since 1971 the players' international society has recommended calling the 'French horn' simply what?

The International Horn Society voted in 1971 that the instrument be called simply the horn, since its modern design is German rather than French; players shade pitch with a hand in the bell.

The Italian word 'violoncello', shortened to cello, literally means what?

Violoncello is 'little violone', the -cello suffix being a diminutive of violone, the big bass viol; the cello is tuned C, G, D, A, an octave below the viola.

The double bass differs from the rest of the orchestral string family in being tuned in which interval?

The double bass is tuned in fourths, E1, A1, D2, G2, matching a bass guitar and the lowest four strings of an ordinary guitar.

Which brothers founded the company that patented the first successful bass drum pedal in 1909?

The pedal let one player cover what had taken two or three, and the 'trap set' was born in New Orleans vaudeville pits. Hi-hat stands followed around 1926.

The steelpan, made from 200-litre industrial drums, is the national instrument of which country?

The steelpan was developed in Trinidad and Tobago, growing out of 1930s Laventille street bands that beat frying pans and dustbin lids; in 2023 the UN declared 11 August World Steelpan Day.

The tuba was patented in 1835 in which country?

Wilhelm Wieprecht and Johann Moritz patented their valved Bass-Tuba in Berlin, Prussia, on 12 September 1835, as a successor to the serpent and ophicleide.

On a five-string banjo, what is unusual about the short drone string?

The short fifth string starts at a peg set into the neck at the fifth fret, so it is markedly shorter than the others and sounds a high drone.

The banjo's ancestors were brought to the Americas from which continent?

The banjo descends from West African gourd lutes such as the akonting, which enslaved Africans rebuilt in the Caribbean and American South from gourds, skin and gut.

An instrument called the accordion was first patented in 1829 in which city?

Cyrill Demian, an organ and piano maker, patented his 'Accordion' in Vienna on 6 May 1829; its free reeds later powered vallenato, norteño, zydeco and tango's bandoneon.

Which composer's Piano Concerto No. 1 features the triangle so prominently it is nicknamed the 'triangle concerto'?

Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat gives the triangle a solo in its scherzo, which led critic Eduard Hanslick to sneer at the 'triangle concerto'.

Johann Christoph Denner invented a single-reed instrument c. 1700 by adding a register key to which earlier one?

Denner added a register key to the chalumeau, a single-reed folk pipe with barely an octave's range, so that it could overblow at the twelfth and reach a high register.

Which instrument opens Gershwin's 1924 rhapsody with a famous upward glissando?

The clarinet's opening glissando began as a rehearsal joke by Paul Whiteman's clarinettist Ross Gorman; Gershwin liked it and kept it for the 1924 premiere.

The pedal harp used in orchestras has how many pedals?

A concert harp has seven pedals, one for each letter name from C to B; each raises or lowers every string of that name by a semitone through Sébastien Érard's double-action mechanism.

The celesta, heard in Tchaikovsky's 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy', was invented in which city?

Auguste Mustel patented the celesta in Paris in 1886; Tchaikovsky heard it there in 1891 and wrote it into The Nutcracker's Sugar Plum Fairy dance the next year.

Which 1874 tone poem uses the xylophone to imitate rattling skeleton bones?

Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre (1874) uses the xylophone for Death's rattling skeletons, an effect he reused for 'Fossils' in The Carnival of the Animals in 1886.

The theremin was invented in October 1920 by a physicist from which country?

Lev Termen, known in the West as Leon Theremin, built it in Petrograd, Russia, in 1920 and demonstrated it to Lenin in 1922; its eerie tone later coloured 1950s science-fiction scores.

Who invented the glass harmonica, a set of friction-played glass bowls, in 1761?

Benjamin Franklin built his glass armonica in 1761 after hearing musical glasses played in London, naming it from the Italian for harmony; Mozart later wrote for it.

The modern ocarina was developed in 1853 by a 17-year-old from which country?

Giuseppe Donati of Budrio, near Bologna in Italy, turned a clay toy whistle into a tuned instrument in 1853; ocarina means 'little goose' in Bolognese dialect.

Which of these is a smaller member of the harpsichord family?

The spinet is a small harpsichord with strings running diagonally to the keyboard; like the virginals and muselar it plucks its strings, whereas the clavichord strikes them.

Historically, what were harpsichord plectra, which pluck the strings, made from?

Harpsichord plectra were cut from bird quill, usually crow or raven feather, with leather as an alternative; most modern builders use Delrin plastic instead.

In the Bantu-derived word 'marimba', what does the prefix 'ma-' mean?

In Bantu languages 'ma-' is a plural prefix meaning 'many', so marimba is 'many rimbas', a rimba being a single wooden bar or one-note xylophone.

On a set of bagpipes, what is the melody pipe played with two hands called?

The chanter is the fingered melody pipe, its name from the Latin cantare, 'to sing'; some Mediterranean and Southwest Asian bagpipes carry two chanters side by side.