Musical keyboard

Pressing a key on the keyboard makes the instrument produce sounds—either by mechanically striking a string or tine (acoustic and electric piano, clavichord), plucking a string (harpsichord), causing air to flow through a pipe organ, striking a bell (carillon), or activating an electronic circuit (synthesizer, digital piano, electronic keyboard).

Many keyboard instruments dating from before the nineteenth century, such as harpsichords and pipe organs, have a keyboard with the colours of the keys reversed: the white notes are made of ebony and the black notes are covered with softer white bone.

Such keyboards accommodate melody and contrasting accompaniment without the expense of a second manual, and were a regular feature in Spanish and some English organs of the renaissance and baroque eras.

The break was between middle C and C-sharp, or outside of Iberia between B and C. Broken keyboards reappeared in 1842 with the harmonium, the split occurring at E4/F4.

The reverse-colored keys on Hammond organs such as the B3, C3 and A100 are latch-style radio buttons for selecting pre-set sounds.

Hailun USA manufactures pianos in the two alternative DS6.0 and DS5.5 sizes through an agreement with the DS Standard Foundation.

Since 2013, a global network of pianists, teachers and performing arts health professionals has been increasingly advocating for change to the 'one size fits all' approach to piano keyboard manufacturing by major companies.

During the sixteenth century, when instruments were often tuned in meantone temperament, some harpsichords were constructed with the G♯ and E♭ keys split into two.

The pipe organ's volume and timbre are controlled by the flow of air from the bellows and the stops preselected by the player.

An arranger keyboard may be preset to produce any of a range of voices as well as percussion and other accompaniments that respond to chords played by the left hand.

Beginners seldom produce a passable rendition of even a simple piece due to lack of technique.

This may accurately describe the player's experience—but in the mechanics of the keyboard, velocity controls musical dynamics.

Examples of music written for the left hand alone include several of Leopold Godowsky's 53 Studies on Chopin's Etudes, Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No.

A number of percussion instruments—such as the xylophone, marimba, vibraphone, or glockenspiel— have pitched elements arranged in the keyboard layout.

Rather than pressing a key, the performer typically strikes each element (e.g., a metal or wood bar) with a mallet.

[9][10] There are some rare variations of keyboards with more or fewer than 12 keys per octave, mostly used in microtonal music, after the discoveries and theoretical developments of musician and inventor Julián Carrillo (1875–1965).

Egyptian belly-dance musicians like Hassam Ramzy use custom-tuned accordions so they can play traditional scales.