Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum The ABF Survey 2011

At the time of this writing, 54% of us have training in "other" musical instruments. I find that interesting.

At the time of this writing, the Adult Beginner/Adult RE-Starter ratio is about 60/40. ..also interesting.

True... but in a half empty/half full sort of way, if we consider the 125 responses to be an estimate of the number of people who look at AB forum fairly consistently, the 55-65 people we get participating in the recitals represents a pretty darned good proportion.

I've always wondered how many regular viewers PW and AB forum attracts... we know it's nowhere near the 59,184 registered members. So, if you're a frequent visitor to AB forum and haven't answered the poll yet, please consider doing so. It would be informative to have a better estimate of how big our little corner of the internet really is.

Here are the instruments with count - guitar is clearly popular. And who's the person who claims guitar hero as an instrument?

30 guitar
10 recorder
9 flute
7 clarinet
6 voice
4 violin
4 trumpet
4 harmonica
3 drums
2 saxophone
2 percussion
2 organ
2 cornet
2 bass
2 accordion
1 vielle
1 tamboura
1 guitar hero
1 cello
1 bass guitar
1 bass clarinet
1 banjo
1 autoharp

Sam

A real lol here!

You have a good point Monica - and imagine how long it would take to listen and give feedback to 125 performances! wow! Yikes! Maybe I should keep quiet

The 59,184 members seems like a huge community but - you're quite right that no where near that number visit regularly, nor do they even participate ! There are literally thousands with no posts ((27,867 in fact). 1161 pages of users with no posts +3)..I got curious as to the exact number.

The nice thing about Sam's poll is that you don't have to be a registered member of PW to participate in it, so we can finally tap into the unknown deep well of unregistered lurkers.

27,867 members with no posts is a lot of lurkers! I wonder why people bother to go to the trouble of creating an account if they're not going to post?

Sam,
Thanks for taking the time and effort in putting together the Survey.
Dot

LOL, me too. I almost choked on my breakfast this morning ...guitar hero...

145 Participants -pretty good turn out!
Anybody else out there who hasn't taken part?

What's a vielle?

There must be something you can't do when you have no account? Can you search without account?

Possibly this:



But more likely this:



Courtesy Wikipedia.

I think that first one is a Hurdy-Gurdy - probably the only keyed string instrument besides the piano. Instead of hammers striking the strings you crank it which rubs a rosin-covered wheel against the strings so they vibrate. You can see the crank and the lighter colored wheel in the photo. The keys are black and white and run alongside what would be the fretboard if there were one. When you press a key it stops the string like a violin to change the pitch. A very odd instrument. All the strings sound all the time, so there are drones.

If you've ever seen the movie "Captain's Courageous" the Spencer Tracy character plays one.

Sam

Whatever it is, it's beautiful!!

The beauty of this survey is that now, we have some data!! Trust me, I will use this data in the future.

I'll say things like:

"Well, jeez, 83% of us are 36 or older!" ....or "50% of us here work without a teacher." ...or "half of us have some training in other instruments."

...and "40% of us have participated in ABF recital."

I'm sure you will !

Of course, you will have to preface all those remarks with: based on responses to the survey. . . .

Because who knows how many of us didn't reply?

Thanks for the response. Indeed wikipedia says it's a thick violin like that second photo (though violins have 4 strings in my book ) And that later it became used to refer to the hurdy gurdy. Interesting

At the risk of going slightly OT, I don't think the mysterious instruments is this:

Baseball Bat Violin

I had the pleasure of going to the game last Sunday and seeing him play the (US) National Anthem on it. It worked pretty well too.

Not necessarily. In statistics-speak, N=150, which I think is a sufficient enough sample size to represent "what's typical" here in the ABF.

It's the Central Limit Theorem at work here.

you're over my head now m'dear!