What are the ergonomic / playing differences between the guitar and the piano?

Question

The guitar and the piano are two of the most popular instruments which allow multiple notes to be played simultaneously.

The acoustic quality of the two instruments are, of course, different, but that is not the focus of this question.

The design of the two instruments affects what and how music are played. Here are some differences I have in mind:

• All semitones are treated equally on the guitar. Guitar chords (other than the open chords) can be moved up and down the fretboard without changing the finger shape. This also allows the player to shift the key easily. On the piano, the same chord takes different shapes in different roots due to the presence of black and white keys.

• Regarding playing multiple notes at the same time, the piano is more flexible than the guitar.

  1. The pianist use ten fingers to play the notes, while the guitarist uses only four (or five if you use the thumb), and at most six notes can be played at the same time (using a bar)

  2. Since you use two hands on the piano, it's easier to play rhythm and melody at the same time.

  3. On a guitar you can only play one note on a string, so the possible voicing of chords is restricted. On the piano you can pretty much play any voicing.

• Strings on the guitar can be bended, for example, to create a vibrating sound. I'm not aware of an equivalent technique on the piano.

• The piano has a wider pitch range than the guitar.

Do you agree? What other important differences can you think of? What are the implications of these differences, if any?

Answer 1

All of your points are good; one of the reasons guitar became so popular in western culture in the early days, is because its portable.

So it's sort of a travelling minstrel's piano. During the late 19th/early20th centuries in America(post emancipation act), there were lots of travelling musicians who couldn't afford a piano; and even if they could, they couldn't have carried one since most of their travelling was done on foot, they would literally play for a couple of meals and a night under a roof. These are the guys that brought us the earliest forms of blues, like the Delta blues; which were basically the old slave work songs Blues'd up (call and response etc.).

If you scout around you can find old photos of these guys with the most battered looking old instruments you can imagine.

However you want to look at it (poor man's piano/portable piano), the portability and relative cheapness (guys would knock them together out of bits of random wood), is a major difference which helped start the wheel of popular music/culture rolling.

Another practical one is that the piano has pedals which can help the player control various aspects of the sound (sustain/velocity/etc.).

Answer 2

The piano has limited ability at expressiveness (maybe not the right word). With a piano you can control how hard you hit the note and have maybe three pedals. While these all affect the sonic characteristic of a piano (it's overtone series), it's a limited range of affects. Guitar, on the other hand, has you interact directly with the string, providing a much wider range of playing styles (pick, finger pick, scrape, tap, hammer on, pull off, bend, etc.). In this respect, the guitar is closer to a violin than a piano.

Answer 3

Another difference is that the two hands play quite similarly on the piano, but quite differently on the guitar. Guitar hands specialize in rhythm (right hand) and pitch (left hand). I play guitar and it always amazes me how impossible it is to play on a left-handed instrument. My left hand has no rhythm and my right fingers don't go where I want them.

Answer 4

One thing not mentioned: the guitar is also used to provide percussion by "golpe", a big part of flamenco playing. Many sounds can be produced, depending on where the guitar is hit, and with what part of the hand it is done. I don't recall seeing anyone banging on the piano as part of the music, but can't say it hasn't been done.

Answer 5

Some things I've noticed:

• If 'position' playing on a guitar where you assign one finger to each fret in a single position and allow for stretches of one fret with the index and pinky, you have access to two octaves plus a perfect 4th. This is 29 semitones under your fingers or about a third of a piano keyboard in a single position. That's a lot of notes...
• Piano can get away with more dissonant voicings than a guitar without them sounding too unpleasant - I realise this is subjective (and I have a few theories as to why this may be, mainly concerning range) but I'm yet to meet someone who disagrees.

An implication of the transposing nature of the guitar which I didn't see mentioned is that transposing in semitones is easier on a guitar (just shift the pattern/chord shape(s) up or down a fret), and transposing in a cycle of 4ths/5ths is easier on a piano (just add one accidental at a time). Therefore the guitar would seem to be a more convenient choice of harmony instrument when comping for a vocalist, as singers often need to transpose up or down a semitone depending on their range that day.

Answer 6

The guitar provides access to variable pitches and pure tones.

Variable pitches As noted by prior answers, guitarists can bend fretted strings for this effect. However no answer has yet mentioned slide guitar. Playing with a slide -- creating your own fret -- allows players to access all sorts of microtonal pitches, above AND below the equal-tempered frets. In this fashion, a slide may readily facilitate access to just-tempered pitches (in any key). The (mis-named) tremolo arm of an electric guitar can also bend pitches, but not with the finesse of a slide. Two modern slide players include Duane Allman and David Gilmour. Their dramatically different styles illustrate the versatility of the slide.

Pure tones These pure tones are more commonly called harmonics. The guitarist has ready access to the vibrating string(s) and can create pure tones by damping the string at a nodal point for one of the fundamental frequency's overtones. With a combination of left and right hands, harmonics may be produced for fretted notes as well. Steve Morse incorporates this technique into his playing style.

Answer 7

All good points. One thing to note is the commonality of those instruments: both are string instruments where you can control the volume of notes individually at the time of its attack but where the basically long decay is pretty much predetermined and you basically can only dampen the note at some point of time (the guitar has slightly more ways for that, though).

It is also interesting to consider a few chimeras: there is the fretted clavichord which has fewer than one string per note and thus can also only play a limited number of chords. There is the autoharp which has dampers in chord arrangement but is strummed manually.

It is also worth noting that there are several piano keyboard arrangements which share the guitar's trait of transposability of chord shapes, like Janko keyboards, and the more ubiquitous chromatic button accordion keyboards.

Chromatic button keyboards (which are available as full-size keyboards with velocity control, like the old Ketron MS80) are not really suitable for "pianoforte" kind of play where an actual striking action is initiated by a key and the loudness depends on its force: due to the "shaping" your hand needs to do, controlling loudness in addition would be hard. Similar to how it is done with guitars, loudness control on actual accordions (rather than accordion-style flat keyboards) is left to the other hand (in this case the left). While the left hand also has to deal with chord buttons, their fingering is much more simplistic than that of the melody hand.

Another note: you point out that one can do pitch bending on a guitar in spite of its fretting. One can also do vibrato (which is quite more subtle than on unfretted string instruments). Surprisingly, a similar action on an acoustic piano key has a very very subtle but not entirely inaudible effect as well though probably not through pitch variation. The same action on an accordion is (again somewhat misleadingly) called "vibrato", is less subtle and more obvious to understand since it obviously transfers to the bellows action.

And of course in some modern music, (grand) piano players are expected to pluck some strings manually as well.

At any rate, one distinguishing feature of the piano is that the sound production and its manipulation are separated through levers, making it possible to "design" the keyboard. This separation is present in other instruments as well, like the celesta or the harmonium. To some lesser degree, some monophonic wind instruments use an arrangement of holes and levers to give an approximation of a diatonic scale augmented with "black keys" (if the underlying scale is not C major, those tend to be a candidate for transposing notation). Even things like xylophones tend to use a diatonic black/white arrangement of notes.

With the exception of the chromatic button accordion I don't really know any instrument with "decoupled keyboard" where a regular chromatic arrangement with constant chord shaping would be in significant use these days. The diatonic+semitones arrangement seems to have won except where dictated by physics, like directly fingered string instruments.

A guitar is, for all its size, a very portable and versatile instrument. Even the smallest accordions weigh a multiple. The most portable instrument with a "keyboard" would likely be a hurdygurdy, but then they are not in much use any more.

Answer 8

Everyone seems to be add a bit to this here and there so I will too.

The guitar has been called a mimic instrument. It can imitate the tone and quality of many other instruments. This alluded to in a previous answer. In some classical guitar scores the notation will indicate what instrument to mimic as an indication to the guitarist how to attack the strings.

I am not sure if this has been mentioned but unlike the piano the guitar typically requires both hands to work in concert to product sound. I say typically because we do have hammer on and pull off techniques that allow us to play whole scales or melodic lines completely with the left hand. But in this case we don't usually do something different with left. On the piano each finger of each hand works independently. Guitarists need to synchronize their hands for different reasons that a piano player does.

Piano has dynamics and variable sustain but really only one attack mode. A guitarist can attack the strings in many different ways, each producing a unique tone. This is what makes the guitar a mimic instrument. You can use it a a drum and tap out rhythms on the body. But I suspect you could do that on a piano top.

Answer 9

Rasgueado (aka Rageo, Rajeo, Rasgueo, Rasgeo) is impossible on a piano. Clusters are barely possible on a guitar. A (non-electric) guitar glissando ends more quietly than it starts: on a piano it needn't. On a piano a note's harmonics can only be sounded by striking its fundamental while holding down the harmonic's key. Long trills are possible on a piano: on a guitar they have to be hammered and are therefore (on a non-electric) rather quiet. On a guitar you can cross one string under another and then pluck them to produce a buzzing, out-of-tune effect. On a piano that's impossible, but pianos can be prepared.