Spinet

The bentside spinet shares most of its characteristics with the full-size instrument, including action, soundboard, and case construction.

The longest side is adjacent to and parallel with the bass strings, going from the right rear corner to a location on the player's left.

The fact that half of the gaps are four millimetres instead of ten makes it possible to crowd more strings together into a smaller case.

[1] In a full-size harpsichord, the registers that guide the jacks can be shifted slightly to one side, permitting the player to control whether or not that particular set of strings is sounded.

The angling of the strings also had consequences for tone quality: generally, it was not possible to make the plucking points as close to the nut as in a regular harpsichord.

Harpsichord historian Frank Hubbard wrote in 1967, "the earliest [bentside] spinet known to me was made by Hieronymus de Zentis in 1631.

"[2] He further notes that the spinet in France was sometimes called the épinette à l'italienne, supporting an Italian origin.

The spinettone was a local success among the musicians of the Medici court,[3] and Cristofori eventually built a total of four of them.

[4] Spinets are occasionally made today, sometimes from kits, and serve the same purpose they always have, of saving money and space.

More generally, the word spinet was not always very sharply defined in former times, particularly in its French and Italian cognate forms épinette and spinetta.

The stickers were sufficiently long that the hammer heads (the highest part of the action) ended up at roughly the same vertical level as the keyboard.

Lastly, the very short strings of the spinet resulted in a narrow range of harmonics and thus in poor tone quality.

[8][9] The Musette, along with its spinet cousins, were initially a success, being the only kind of piano that many people could afford in the depths of the Great Depression.