Yamaha’s Electronic Grand Piano

Yamaha has done more than capture the soul of a grand piano in an electronic device. They have improved on a 300-year-old instrument.

The AvantGrand can instantly retune itself to a variety of tunings, or “temperaments,” from Donald Duck’s Pythagorean scale to those that were standard during Bach’s lifetime, which is very titillating for baroque-enthusiasts. Those wishing to precisely re-create the tuning that Bach used can hit a few buttons on the control panel, and the pitches of the notes will revert to the asymmetric tuning used in the very early days of the piano, when different keys had different personalities, since they weren’t all equally corrected.

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