Casio SA-47 Mini Keyboard 32 Mini-size keysBest feature of Casio SA47 is simple tone selection with piano, harmonium and organ tone button5 drum padsIndian music supportBuilt-in grip for easy portability For details, Click - Casio SA47 For price, Click - Casio SA47 price Casio CTK-2400 Standard Keyboard 61 piano-style keysBuilt-in Microphone with Sampling functionAHL. What Makes CASIO Keyboards Different? Unlike electronic pianos or digital pianos, which have a classic set of 88 keys, keyboards have 49, 61, or 76 keys. The usual hammer action used for pianos is avoided, so that the keys are especially smooth as on an organ or synthesiser. This makes the keyboards from CASIO different.

Layout of a musical keyboard (three octaves shown)

88-key piano illustration

The musical keyboard of a Steinway concert grand piano

A musical keyboard is the set of adjacent depressible levers or keys on a musical instrument. Keyboards typically contain keys for playing the twelve notes of the Western musical scale, with a combination of larger, longer keys and smaller, shorter keys that repeats at the interval of an octave. Depressing a key on the keyboard makes the instrument produce sounds—either by mechanically striking a string or tine (acoustic and electric piano, clavichord), plucking a string (harpsichord), causing air to flow through a pipe organ, striking a bell (carillon), or, on electric and electronic keyboards, completing a circuit (Hammond organ, digital piano, synthesizer). Since the most commonly encountered keyboard instrument is the piano, the keyboard layout is often referred to as the piano keyboard.

Description[edit]

Harpsichord with black keys for the C majorscale

The twelve notes of the Western musical scale are laid out with the lowest note on the left;^[1] The longer keys (for the seven 'natural' notes of the C majorscale: C, D, E, F, G, A, B) jut forward. Because these keys were traditionally covered in ivory they are often called the white notes or white keys. The keys for the remaining five notes—which are not part of the C major scale—(i.e., C♯/D♭, D♯/E♭, F♯/G♭, G♯/A♭, A♯/B♭) (see Sharp and Flat) are raised and shorter. Because these keys receive less wear, they are often made of black colored wood and called the black notes or black keys. The pattern repeats at the interval of an octave.

The arrangement of longer keys for C major with intervening, shorter keys for the intermediate semitones dates to the 15th century. Many keyboard instruments dating from before the nineteenth century, such as harpsichords and pipe organs, have a keyboard with the colours of the keys reversed: the white notes are made of ebony and the black notes are covered with softer white bone. A few electric and electronic instruments from the 1960s and subsequent decades have also done this; Vox's electronic organs of the 1960s, Farfisa's FAST portable organs, Hohner's Clavinet L, one version of Korg's Poly-800 synthesizer and Roland's digital harpsichords.

Some 1960s electronic organs used reverse colors or gray sharps or naturals to indicate the lower part (or parts) of a single keyboard divided into two parts, each controlling a different registration or sound. Such keyboards accommodate melody and contrasting accompaniment without the expense of a second manual, and were a regular feature in Spanish and some English organs of the renaissance and baroque eras. The break was between middle C and C-sharp, or outside of Iberia between B and C. Broken keyboards reappeared in 1842 with the harmonium, the split occurring at E4/F4.

The reverse-colored keys on Hammond organs such as the B3, C3 and A100 are latch-style radio buttons for selecting pre-set sounds.

Size and historical variation[edit]

Keyboards of Nicholas Faber's organ for Halberstadt, built in 1361 and enlarged 1495. The illustration is from Praetorius' Syntagma Musicum (1619). At the top is the earliest example of the 'seven plus five' layout. The bottom two illustrate the earlier 'eight plus four' arrangement

The chromatic range (also called compass) of keyboard instruments has tended to increase. Harpsichords often extended over five octaves (>60 keys) in the 18th century, while most pianos manufactured since about 1870 have 88 keys. The lowest pitch (frequency: 27.5 Hz) of an 88-key piano is equivalent to a sub contrabass in the range name. Some modern pianos have even more notes (a Bösendorfer 290 'Imperial' has 97 keys, and a Stuart & Sons model has 108 keys^[2]). While modern synthesizer keyboards commonly have either 61, 76 or 88 keys, small MIDI controllers are available with 25 keys. (Digital systems allow shifting octaves, pitch, and 'splitting' ranges dynamically, which, in some cases, reduce the need for dedicated keys. However, smaller keyboards will typically limit which musical scores can be played.) Organs normally have 61 keys per manual, though some spinet models have 44 or 49. An organ pedalboard is a keyboard with long pedals played by the organist's feet. Pedalboards vary in size from 12 to 32 notes.

In a typical keyboard layout, black note keys have uniform width, and white note keys have uniform width and uniform spacing at the front of the keyboard. In the larger gaps between the black keys, the width of the natural notes C, D and E differ slightly from the width of keys F, G, A and B. This allows close to uniform spacing of 12 keys per octave while maintaining uniformity of seven 'natural' keys per octave.

Over the last three hundred years, the octave span distance found on historical keyboard instruments (organs, virginals, clavichords, harpsichords, and pianos) has ranged from as little as 125 mm (4.9 in) to as much as 170 mm (6.7 in). Modern piano keyboards ordinarily have an octave span of 164–165 mm (6.5–6.5 in), resulting in the width of black keys averaging 13.7 mm (0.54 in) and white keys about 23.5 mm (0.93 in) at the base, disregarding space between keys. Several reduced-size standards have been proposed and marketed. A 15/16 size (152 mm (6.0 in) octave span) and the 7/8 DS Standard (140 mm (5.5 in) octave span) keyboard developed by Christopher Donison in the 1970s and developed and marketed by Steinbuhler & Company. U.S. pianist Hannah Reimann has promoted piano keyboards with narrower octave spans and has a U.S. patent on the apparatus and methods for modifying existing pianos to provide interchangeable keyboards of different sizes.^[3]

There have been variations in the design of the keyboard to address technical and musical issues. The earliest designs of keyboards were based heavily on the notes used in Gregorian chant (the seven diatonic notes plus B-flat) and as such would often include B♭ and B♮ both as diatonic 'white notes', with the B♮ at the leftmost side of the keyboard and the B♭ at the rightmost. Thus, an octave would have eight 'white keys' and only four 'black keys'. The emphasis on these eight notes would continue for a few centuries after the 'seven and five' system was adopted, in the form of the short octave: the eight aforementioned notes were arranged at the leftmost side of the keyboard, compressed in the keys between E and C (at the time, accidentals that low were very uncommon and thus not needed). During the sixteenth century, when instruments were often tuned in meantone temperament, some harpsichords were constructed with the G♯ and E♭ keys split into two. One portion of the G♯ key operated a string tuned to G♯ and the other operated a string tuned to A♭, similarly one portion of the E♭ key operated a string tuned to E♭, the other portion operating a string tuned to D♯. This type of keyboard layout, known as the enharmonic keyboard, extended the flexibility of the harpsichord, enabling composers to write keyboard music calling for harmonies containing the so-called wolf fifth (G-sharp to E-flat), but without producing aural discomfort in the listeners (see Split sharp). The 'broken octave', a variation of the aforementioned short octave, similarly used split keys to add accidentals left out of the short octave. Other examples of variations in keyboard design include the Jankó keyboard and the chromatic keyboard systems on the chromatic button accordion and bandoneón.

Electronic keyboards[edit]

Simpler electronic keyboards have switches under each key. Depressing a key connects a circuit, which trig

Casio Keyboard Keys Labeling