Operation Manual

3.3 Polyphony Combo Box 29
3.3 Polyphony Combo Box
Displays the number of voices of polyphony (2 to 32). The number of voices can
be adjusted with the drop down menu from the combo box.
3.4 General Functioning of an Electric Piano
The electric piano was invented by Harold Rhodes (1910-2000) during the forties
when he was in the army. The first instruments he built were made of aircraft
pieces and were intended to entertain army servicemen. It became a very popular
instrument in jazz and rock and its warm tone still appears in about all new musical
styles these days.
The mechanism of the electric piano is, in fact, quite simple and is illustrated
in Figure 9. A note played on the keyboard activates a hammer that hits a fork.
The sound of that fork is then amplified by a magnetic coil pick up and sent to the
output, very much like an electric guitar. The fork is made of two parts : the tine
and the tone bar. The tine bar is where the mallet hits the fork.
The Lounge Lizard synthesis engine faithfully reproduces the functioning and
interaction of these components taking into account their physical and geometrical
properties. In the original version of the Lounge Lizard EP, the user interface
enables one to adjust these properties and get a wide variety of tone colors. In
this Session edition, these parameters have been adjusted for you in order to model
different types of pianos which can be selected from the Piano module.