Awesome Pianos

Piano? More like paino. Mattias Krantz has a thing for making dangerous musical instruments. After creating a piano that’s capable of electrocution, he moved on to one that triggers paintball guns when its keys are pressed. It plays music by turning its victims’ screams into notes.

Pianos are some of the most complicated musical instruments, so the idea that you can build one from 3D-printed parts is pretty nifty. Mechanistic shows us how to assemble one of his working mini pianos. STL files are available for 13-key and 5-key models for a small fee, along with a free sample of a single-key model. We want an 88-key version.

For hundreds of years, pianos have largely remained unchanged. Whipsaw Design Lab shakes things up with its innovative Ravenchord piano. Shaped like a bird’s wing, the piano’s visible strings are arranged around a spiral-shaped frame while its keys sit atop the structure. It uses solenoids to activate dampers hidden at the center of its spiral.

Classic.FM recently turned us on to a 97-key piano that has just a single octave. Now, they are showing off another unusual instrument – a piano that only has white keys. Micronet’s Sinhakken piano still has 88 keys, but it looks far more difficult to play without black keys for reference.

Created by German instrument maker Sauter, the Mikroton is a specially-tuned piano that only has 1/16th of a step between its keys. Despite having nine more keys than a regular piano, it only has a one octave range. Musician Antune demonstrates its ability to produce an incredibly smooth progression of notes.

Cristiana Felgueiras of Get Hands Dirty shows off an awesome piece of furniture she designed for efficiency in a tiny apartment she’s building out. The desk has a floating design and a built-in electronic piano that slides out from underneath its work surface. She also built a matching rolling cabinet with a secret drawer.

There are lots of ways to learn to play the piano. Joel Creates and his friend Eric came up with the cruelest method. Their electric piano keyboard uses negative reinforcement, zapping students with high-voltage electricity if they mess up. It has electrodes on every key, so it shocks the same finger that played the wrong note.

With so many nooks and crannies and moving parts, pianos require regular cleaning and maintenance. Josiah Jackson, aka The Piano Doctor volunteered his services to clean a vintage piano with decades of dust and grime. After finishing the laborious task of removing dirt from under its wires, he gave it a full tune-up.

One of the most elaborate custom pianos in history, Pictures at an Exhibition, was created by noted painter/pianist Paul Wyse. The one-of-a-kind Steinway & Sons Model D concert grand piano features 24-carat gold, cast bronze, and classically painted scenes to pay tribute to Modest Mussorgsky’s most profound composition for solo piano.

Player pianos have been around since the 1890s. Modern models use electronics and servos, but vintage ones use a pedal-powered pneumatic system that forces air through holes in the music roll, actuating pushrods that move its hammers. Chris Plaola shows off an example of this Victorian-era engineering genius.

There are different kinds of puppets, from a sock on the hand to complex marionettes controlled by strings. This street performer shows off his mastery of the latter by puppeteering a character to play the piano with a string attached to each finger. We know he’s not playing actual notes, but we’re still impressed.

After melting all of the strings on his piano with high-voltage sparks, Mattias Krantz wanted to see if he could still make music with the thing. So he got to work building a series of circuits that fire plasma arcs onto the piano’s metal backboard to make sounds when he presses the piano’s keys. But it wasn’t easy getting it to work.

Musician and maker Mattias Krantz has done some pretty crazy things to pianos. This time, he teamed up with Mehdi Sadaghdar of Electroboom to create the most dangerous piano ever. Using a bunch of cheap camera capacitors, he modified his hammer-head piano to create high-voltage sparks when played.

The kalimba is a small musical instrument that’s played by thumping your fingers on its springy metal keys. But the same idea can be DIYed using a bunch of popsicle sticks, screwed in place at varying lengths along a board. Mr. Mash shows off his homemade instrument, along with an abridged version of his how-to video.

Pianos must be able to play hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of notes during their lifetimes. This fascinating video shows how one piano manufacturer tests their mechanisms while loosening up any stiff parts before delivery. The machine has 88 “fingers” that each strike a key in rapid succession.

The Laowa 24mm Probe Lens has enabled some pretty amazing views of the world. Jens from Another Perspective stuck the long and skinny macro lens inside a piano to give us an up-close and personal look at its strings, hammers, and other mechanical components.