Piano Glossaries – Annotated Link List

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Piano Glossaries – Annotated Link List

This list is the result of screening, comparing and evaluating the first 50 results in Google for the search term “piano glossary”. By filtering out non-relevant results, e.g. general music glossaries that answer this search, redundant content, and low quality reference works, I hope to ease your search for reliable piano information.

The Perls

Perls are dictionaries and glossaries, that can I recommend wholeheartedly based on their content and design. Here are the piano online glossaries, that will give you a great start in investigation terms related to pianos.

Bill Calhoun’s Piano Glossary: Comprehensive, hyperlinked glossary related to piano parts with rich illustrations and animations. Covered are 44 terms with clearly written and well informed definitions.

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The Piano Deconstructed – Glossary of Terms: 91 terms related to the piano and its parts. While the definitions are rather poor, each terms is linked to an additional page with rich illustrations and explanations.

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Piano Renaissance – Piano Glossary: A short compilation, comprising out of 30 terms, of basic & simple terminology and definitions for piano parts commonly used in the rebuilding process.

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Acoustic Piano Glossary: 38 terms, with well written definitions and illustrations.

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Keyboard & Digital Piano Glossary: With 63 terms this is a very comprehensive glossary, presented  in a  clean design and with helpful illustrations.

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Additional recommended piano glossaries

In this section you will find are dictionaries and glossaries, that I recommend, even though I did not dedicate a blog post to them.

• Glossary of Piano Parts and Terms – 72 terms, some of them unique. Annoying, misleading hyperlinks (rather placed for SEO instead of information sharing) – http://www.steinwaypianos.com/kb/shopping/glossary
• Shawn’s Piano :: Piano Glossary – only 10 terms. http://www.shawnspiano.com/piano-glossary.php
• Digital vs. Acoustic Piano Glossary Of Terms – http://www.tuition.ridgwick.com/buying-a-piano.php

Piano glossaries, the annoying part

As the title says….. Don’t waste your time on them!

• Glossary of piano terms – http://www.bluebookofpianos.com/glossary.htm:  Ugly, annoying site behavior (forcing you back to the homepage all the time). 83 terms, but by far not all related to pianos. Shockingly enough, this one is number 1 on Google. Thumbs down!