He starts playing the Square Piano at 4:50.

What a collection! I recently purchased and early Tomkison square pianoforte 1805!

There is an interesting , and more direct, precursor to the piano, though: the _dulce melos_, which is described in the 15th c. van Zwolle MS. It used a very simple hammer action, not unlike the Zumpe: an instrument of this type ("dulcemel para taner") is listed in the inventory of Queen Isabella of Spain.

The Clavichord is so cute!

This is wonderful

Thanks for posting :D

1:38

So cool! I like the litle clavichord

I love the different dampers and the lute stop! I wish some modern builders would include those, and while they're at it, I wouldn't mind a Jannisary pedal :)

These had a lute stops too?! Why can't my piano have a lute stop too, dammit! :'(

This is a bit inaccurate. The piano was invented in 1700, not the second half of the 18th century en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomeo_Cristofori?wprov=sfla1 ; JS Bach, who died in 1750, was able to play an early version by Silbermann (Zumpe's master). Its inventor, Christofori, called it a "harp-harpsichord with loud and soft" (piano i forte) - no clavichords were involved in his thought processes. And as well as the "square" clavichords (a clavichord can only work if the strings are perpendicular to the keys), there were also "square harpsichords", aka virginals. Anyway, although a Zumpe piano action is mechanically kind of a cross between a clavichord's, a harpsichord's and a "real" piano's (there is a little stick rising from the key, a bit like a clavichord tangent), its physical _principle_ is much closer to a harpsichord: you just swap the jack, with its plectrum and damper, for a hammer and separate damper. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Zumpe?wprov=sfla1

cool instruments but what happened with the video resolution, letterboxing and so on. it looks like a proper recording somehow got trashed midway through the editing software. please upload original quality if you can, but good job anyways!