kitchenpete wrote:McTag wrote:McTag wrote:No completely correct answers received so far.
Hint: when the music (sheet music/ score) calls for
Tre Corde or
Una Corda, what is happening?
Most notes on a piano are made up of 3 strings. The very bass notes are single string but the use of one of the pedals means that 2 strings are damped while the other one is still allowed to vibrate.
The "honkey tonk" sound of pub pianos is usually because not all 3 strings are in tune with each other, giving the strange sound. Of course, this can be artificially replicated by a tuner or on a sythesiser.
Irving Berlin - without searching, the answer doesn't appear to me.
KP
Well here's what I was getting at. The mechanism for "soft" in an upright piano is different from that on a grand. On an upright, the rack of hammers is simply moved closer to the strings, so that they have less distance to travel, and so make a quieter sound.
On a concert grand, the whole rack of hammers is moved a small distance to one side, so that an individual hammer will strike only one string (hence
Una Corda) instead of all three (
Tre Corde)
In the case of Irving Berlin, he apparently could play the piano fluently in only one key. To overcome this, as he sometimes had to transpose a tune, he had a special piano built in which the hammers could be moved a considerable distance sideways. So, for example, he could play in C and the piano would sound in F
