Mondo Knows Facts
A harpsichord plucks strings instead of striking them
Quills catch the string, and volume stays fixed regardless of touch That lack of dynamic control is why the piano displaced it as tastes favoured expressive playing. Harpsichords often carry two manuals and several sets of strings for contrasting registration. Modern builders still follow seventeenth and eighteenth century designs. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: keyboards, history, instruments
A harpsichord plucks strings instead of striking them: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Quills catch the string, and volume stays fixed regardless of touch. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.