50 Fun Facts About Musical Instruments

How many keys does a standard modern piano have?

That is 52 white and 36 black. The Imperial Bösendorfer adds nine extra bass keys for a total of 97, giving it a full eight octaves.

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

He was an expert harpsichord builder, and his innovation was hammers that strike the strings and fall away, letting the player control volume. Three of his pianos survive, all from the 1720s.

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

The nine extra keys sit at the bass end and are often coloured black so pianists don't lose 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 moved to Paris and spent much of his life in lawsuits with rivals over his patents. Military bands adopted the instrument long before jazz did.

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

From low to high the notes are G, D, A and E. The double bass is the odd one out in the string section, tuned in fourths.

The 'Lady Blunt' Stradivarius sold in 2011 for how much, a record for a violin at auction?

The 1721 instrument was sold to raise money for Japanese earthquake relief. Blind tests since the 19th century have repeatedly failed to find that listeners prefer Strads over good modern violins.

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

He made more than 1,100 in his Cremona workshop. Tree-ring analysis shows most soundboards came from Norway spruce grown high in the Alps.

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

Two antennas sense the player's hands, one for pitch and one for volume. Russian physicist Lev Termen later spied for the Soviets in the US.

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

Trombonist Paul Tanner built the slide-controlled device, which is far easier to play in tune than the real thing.

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

The insects eat only the dead heartwood; the living sapwood repels them. Players use circular breathing to keep the drone going for many minutes.

The Hawaiian word 'ukulele' roughly translates as what?

Possibly a nod to the player's darting fingers. The instrument was developed in the 1880s from small guitars brought by Portuguese immigrants from Madeira.

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

The machete, cavaquinho and rajão arrived from Madeira and the Azores. King Kalākaua's enthusiasm made it a fixture of royal gatherings.

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

Bags were traditionally goat, sheep, cow or even dog skin.

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

Its pitch is stable and its penetrating tone cuts through the hall. The name comes from the French hautbois, 'high-pitched woodwind'.

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

The Hohle Fels flute has five finger holes and is between 35,000 and 43,000 years old. A supposed older Neanderthal flute from Slovenia may just be a bone chewed by a hyena.

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 Torres Jurado is the name every luthier knows. The English word itself came via Spanish 'guitarra' from Andalusian Arabic and ultimately Greek.

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 first radioed a deadpan report of a 'satellite' in polar orbit piloted by a man in a red suit. The instruments are on display at the Smithsonian.

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

Matthias Hohner's firm still makes them there. Bob Dylan's neck rack let him play harmonica and guitar at once, a habit borrowed from folk singers before him.

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

Built between 1929 and 1932, its Grand Ophicleide stop hits 130 decibels at one metre. A hurricane in 1944 began decades of damage that a $16 million restoration is still repairing.

What powered the wind supply of Ctesibius's 3rd-century BC 'hydraulis', the first organ?

The medieval poet Guillaume de Machaut called the organ 'the king of instruments', a title it has kept.

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

The system was published in 1914; membranophones are drums, chordophones strings, aerophones winds. Sachs added electrophones as a fifth group in 1940.

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

It appeared in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie and is modelled on library classification numbers, allowing more than 300 basic categories.

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

He went on to study with Ravi Shankar, who had been introducing the instrument to Western audiences since the late 1950s. A sitar can carry up to 21 strings, most of them sympathetic.

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

Only six or seven are actually played; the rest ring in sympathy. The resonating chamber is traditionally a calabash gourd.

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 modern instrument is largely German in design. Players still control pitch and tone by how far they push a hand into the bell.

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

The violone was the bass of the viol family. Cellos are tuned C, G, D, A, an octave below the viola, and Bach's six unaccompanied suites are the instrument's scripture.

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

E, A, D, G, the same as a bass guitar and the low four strings of an ordinary guitar. Bluegrass and rockabilly players slap the strings against the fingerboard for percussion.

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.

Early drummers were called 'trap drummers' and their kit a 'trap set'. Where did the word come from?

Whistles, woodblocks and cowbells for sound effects were the 'traps'. The modern kit came together in New Orleans in the 1920s.

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

It grew out of 1930s Laventille street bands playing 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 called it the Bass-Tuba, descended from the serpent and ophicleide. Sousa later had a version built with the bell pointing up: the sousaphone.

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

The short drone string is three-quarters the length of the rest. Earl Scruggs's three-finger picking turned the instrument into the voice of bluegrass.

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

Early banjos were made by enslaved and free African Americans from gourds and skin. Its later journey through minstrel shows to bluegrass is one of the strangest in music.

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

Cyrill Demian's bellows-driven free-reed box spread everywhere: Colombian vallenato, Dominican merengue, Mexican norteño, Louisiana zydeco and Argentine tango's bandoneon.

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

The triangle solos in the third movement. One corner is deliberately left open so the instrument has no definite pitch.

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

The instrument's most famous entrance is the wailing glissando that opens Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in 1924.

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

The slide was a rehearsal joke by clarinettist Ross Gorman that Gershwin liked and kept. Benny Goodman later made the instrument the sound of the swing era.

The pedal harp used in orchestras has how many pedals?

Each pedal retunes every string of one letter name. Sébastien Érard's double-action mechanism of 1811 is still the basis of the modern instrument.

Since which year has the Guinness brewery used a harp as its emblem?

The Irish state's harp, adopted in 1922, faces left; Guinness's faces right, which is how the two coexist. The earliest harps come from Sumerian tombs at Ur, around 2500 BC.

Which 1874 piece first used the orchestral xylophone, representing rattling skeletons?

Saint-Saëns liked the effect enough to reuse it for 'Fossils' in The Carnival of the Animals. The name is Greek: xylon (wood) and phone (sound).

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

Lev Termen, known in the West as Leon Theremin, demonstrated it to Lenin. Its eerie tone later defined 1950s science-fiction scores like The Day the Earth Stood Still.

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

He called it the armonica, from the Italian for harmony; the free-reed mouth harmonica was not invented until 1821.

Giuseppe Donati, the 17-year-old who invented the modern ocarina in 1853, came from which country?

Donati, from Budrio near Bologna, turned a toy into a real instrument; the name means 'little goose' in Bolognese dialect.

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

The term covers the whole family of plucked-keyboard instruments, including the virginals and muselar; the clavichord strikes its strings instead.

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

Leather was also used; many modern instruments use plastic plectra made of delrin or celcon.

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

'-rimba' means xylophone; the word's first documented English use dates to 1704.

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

Its name comes from the Latin cantare, 'to sing'; some pipes in North Africa, the Balkans and Southwest Asia have two of them.