So there is also a damper that sits on the key until the player hits the key at which point it releases until the player lets go of the key. It doesn’t end there - the string is now ringing nicely regardless of what the pianist is doing which means with fast passages it all gets muddy and confused as everything rings out, and how will they write massively chromatic music in about 150 years time with ringy-outy massive dulcimer machines.
So the hammer has to free itself from the players control for about 2mm, hit the string and the bounce back into the pianist’s control. Unfortunately if the hammer stays up it makes the string go dead straight away and that sounds really crap not like a massive dulcimer at all. Firstly, you need to press down on a keyboard and make a hammer go up and hit the key in the sweet spot. But the complexity of the task cannot be underestimated. Fortunately for him there was no internet or Sky Atlantic in those days so he had naff-all else to do. Whilst the harpsichord is a fairly simple device, the bloke who decided he was going to build a massive dulcimer with a keyboard attached probably felt at some point he’d bitten off more than he could chew. Next up is the keyboard, which has little felt hammers - the whole contraption slides under the strings. Because of the pressures involved with a hundred odd taut strings (20 tonnes for grand pianos) the whole thing is reinforced with a massive iron brace which stops the piano snapping you up like a well-polished, massive mouse trap. In order to keep the wood bent you need several wooden braces that are designed to further distribute the sound across the grain, which is more difficult than down it. So they mounted a bunch of strings (three per note up top, one per note down bottom - because the lower the note, the longer the string, and the longer the string, the more welly you produce, so you need three strings up top to balance the hoofters down bottom) onto a bridge, which transmits the vibrations into the sound board - a massive sheet of wood, that is bent slightly because wood resonates better that way. Imagine if we could have a keyboard a bit like one of those new-fangled futuristic harpsichord things? That way we could play more than two notes at a time”. This is basically a massive dulcimer and it was like someone back in the 1700s said, “I like massive dulcimers pity you have to play them with soft hammers that you have to hold.