My organic life
I am an organist.
Why not a pianist or a keyboardist? All three of these terms sound similar but there are differences that may not seem so obvious on the surface. Let’s try and understand what the differences are.
Lets start with the keyboard.
The “keyboard” that most people are familiar with is the “synthesizer”. It is a portable keyboard instrument with a variety of inbuilt tones.
The term “keyboard” is not the same as “synthesizer”.
A musical keyboard is the set of adjacent depressible levers or keys on a musical instrument.
A keyboard is literally a board with a bunch of keys on it. It contains white keys and black keys placed adjacent to each other in a pattern. By itself, the keyboard doesn’t do much. It is used as an “input” device for many instruments, including the piano and the organ. (See “keyboard instrument”).
Now lets see what the piano is all about.
The piano is an acoustic, stringed musical instrument in which the strings are struck by hammers.
So the piano is a “keyboard instrument”. It uses the keyboard as its input device. When we press a key on the piano, the internal mechanism causes a hammer to be struck against a string, thus producing sound. Because of this, the volume of a note depends on how hard you press the key. The harder you press, the louder it gets. The note eventually fades away with time. There are also three foot pedals on the piano, one of which is the sustain pedal. For as long as the sustain pedal is depressed, the notes will fade away more slowly than usual.
Now onto the organ.
The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurized air (called wind) through organ pipes selected via a keyboard.
The pipe organ is a “keyboard instrument”. This one in the picture has a total of 6 keyboards. Five that are playable by hand and one that’s playable by the feet. The keyboard for the feet is called the “bass pedal” and it usually plays the lowest notes (aka bass notes). The levers on either side of the keyboards are called “stops” and are used to select which pipes should sound for each keyboard. Organs typically include pipes for a lot of instruments including common ones like the flute and trumpet.
When we press a key on the organ it mechanically moves a switch, causing air to be allowed into the pipes which then produce the sound. This doesn’t cause air to be allowed into all the pipes, only the ones that were selected using the “stops”. Each key is basically an ON/OFF switch. The volume doesn’t change no matter how hard you press a key. And the sound will continue to play for as long as the key is depressed.
I’ve covered just a few of the differences that I feel are important for people to be able to appreciate the instruments for what they really are. There is really no way to compare the differences between a piano and an organ, or to suggest that one is better than the other. Both of them are beautiful instruments, each with their own characteristic tones.
I play the organ. Therefore I am an organist. Not a really good one, but I’m learning new things everyday.
If you liked this post, you might like to listen to my recordings on SoundCloud. Thanks!
