Electronic piano

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Electronic piano

An electronic piano is a keyboard instrument

Keyboard instrument

A keyboard instrument is any musical instrument played using a musical keyboard. The most common of these is the piano. Other widely used keyboard instruments include various types of organ s as well as other mechanical, electromechanical and electronic musical instrument....
designed to simulate the timbre

Timbre

In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices or musical instruments....
of a piano

Piano

The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard instrument. Widely used in Western music for solo performance, ensemble use, chamber music, and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to musical composition and rehearsal....
(and sometimes a harpsichord

Harpsichord

A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a musical keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when each Key is pressed....
or an organ

Organ (music)

The organ is a keyboard instrument of one or more divisions, each played with its own keyboard played either Manual or Pedal clavier. The organ is one of the oldest musical instruments in the European classical music....
) using analog circuitry.

Electronic Piano was also the trade name used for Wurlitzer

Wurlitzer

The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, usually referred to simply as Wurlitzer, is an American company, formerly a producer of stringed instruments, woodwind, brass instruments, theatre organs, fairground organ, orchestrions, electronic organs, Wurlitzer electric piano and jukeboxes....
's popular line of electric piano

Electric piano

An electric piano is an electric musical instrument. The popularity of the electric piano began to grow in the late 1960s, reaching its greatest height during the 1970s....
s, which were produced from the 1950s to the 1980s, although this was not actually what is now commonly known as an electronic piano. Electronic pianos work similarly to analog synthesizer

Synthesizer

A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing a variety of sounds by generating and combining signals of different frequency....
s in that they generate their tones through oscillators

Electronic oscillator

An electronic oscillator is an electronic circuit that produces a repetitive electronic signal, often a sine wave or a square wave.A low frequency oscillation is an electronic oscillator that generates an alternating current waveform at a frequency below ?200 Hz....
, whereas electric pianos are mechanical, their sound being electrified by a pickup

Pickup (music)

A pickup device acts as a transducer that captures mechanical vibrations and converts them to an electrical signal, which can be instrument amplifier and sound recording....
.

Most electronic pianos date from the 1970s and were made in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
, although similar models were made concurrently in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south....
.

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Encyclopedia

An electronic piano is a keyboard instrument

Keyboard instrument

Timbre

In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices or musical instruments....
of a piano

Piano

Harpsichord

A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a musical keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when each Key is pressed....
or an organ

Organ (music)

Wurlitzer

Electric piano

Synthesizer

Electronic oscillator

Pickup (music)

Italy

Japan

Rocky Mount Instruments

Rocky Mount Instruments or RMI was a subsidiary of the Allen Organ. It was based in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. It is most famous for the RMI Electra-Piano and Harpsichord, a keyboard instrument that created piano and harpsichord-like sounds without the use of strings, tines, or reeds....
in the USA from 1967 to approximately 1980, which became one of the more popular electronic pianos used by professional musicians. Most electronic pianos (including the RMI) are not velocity sensitive, in that they do not vary their volume based on how hard or soft the keys are played, like an organ

Organ (music)

The organ is a keyboard instrument of one or more divisions, each played with its own keyboard played either Manual or Pedal clavier. The organ is one of the oldest musical instruments in the European classical music....
.

Electronic pianos became less popular in the 1980s when the digital piano

Digital piano

A digital piano is a modern electronic musical instrument designed to serve primarily as an alternative to a traditional piano, both in the way it feels to play and in the sound produced....
and polyphonic synthesizer

Synthesizer

A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing a variety of sounds by generating and combining signals of different frequency....
became available and affordable enough for both professional and home use as an inexpensive, smaller and lighter alternative to an acoustic piano. The triumph of the synthesized piano first came in 1982, with the development of the Kurzweil K250

Kurzweil K250

The Kurzweil K250 a.k.a. "Kurzweil 250", "K250" or "K-250", manufactured by Kurzweil Music Systems was the first electronic musical instrument which produced sound derived from sampled sounds burned onto integrated circuits known as Read Only Memory without the requirement for any type of disk drive....
; today, synthesized pianos have attained a remarkable level of realism.