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What is an instrument?

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ForteBass:
Ok just to make sure the other thread stays on topic, we'll take this debate here. The reasoning I'm hearing for a digital piano not being a piano are minor timbre differences. And for these reasons it wouls also mean that any digital or electric instrument, isn't an instrument at all then.

Discuss. And don't be an elitist dick.

mAlice aforeThought:
anything out ov which you can get a pleasing sound is an instrument (passive listening devices such as speakers excepted).

bucky_2300:
Right now, I am holding a guitar. It has six strings, 22 frets, 6 tuners, a bridge, a headstock, and a body. It is a guitar. However, it does not have a big hole in the middle. It has two magnets with wire wrapped around them in the middle. It doesn't have a chambered body for resonance. It has an output jack. But it's still a guitar.

If a piano has three pedals, 88 keys of the white and black variety spaced at the proper intervals and with the right tones associated with the right keys, it is a piano. If it makes noise like a piano, and looks like a piano, but lacks the strings and acoustic chambers of an acoustic piano, it is still a piano.

My two cents.

blindsuperhero:
I don't think there's much room for discussion here. A piano is a tuned percussion instrument that creates a sound by hammers hitting strings. If it doesn't do that, it's not a piano. If I set a keyboard to 'guitar' mode or whatever, am I playing a guitar? If I use a software synthesiser on my computer to make a ukelele sound, is my computer a ukelele? I hope the answers in both casers would be no.


--- Quote ---Right now, I am holding a guitar. It has six strings, 22 frets, 6 tuners, a bridge, a headstock, and a body. It is a guitar.
--- End quote ---


Right, so by your logic, if an instrument had 200-odd strings (I don't know exactly how many), 88 keys, tuning pegs, a soundboard and a frame, it would be a piano. Which is not the same as

--- Quote ---If a piano has three pedals, 88 keys of the white and black variety spaced at the proper intervals and with the right tones associated with the right keys, it is a piano. If it makes noise like a piano, and looks like a piano, but lacks the strings and acoustic chambers of an acoustic piano, it is still a piano.
--- End quote ---


Now, I might consider calling a Fender Rhodes or a Wurlitzer piano a piano, because they're basically the piano equivalent of an electric guitar. I would never called a synthesiser, whether played by keyboard or not, a piano.

Mnementh:
A solid body guitar and an acoustic guitar are still using the same method to create the sound, no matter that one doesn't have a built in "amp."  Yours is using means other than what a piano uses to reproduce the sound of a piano.  It's just a very accurate keyboard.

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