Challenges of Lighting Piano Music

Dec. 12, 2009 - PRLog -- Poor lighting resulting in eye strain and missed notes when reading music is among the top ten complaints of musicians. Spinet home pianos are often tucked against a wall with no natural light and poor interior lighting. Grand piano players find themselves with shadows on the music and, often have  inadequate lighting to illuminate the music.

Task lighting for scores and sheet music has its own challenges. Much music opens to a width of 18 inches or more, and often the musician spreads music across the rack – sometimes extending even beyond the width of the rack. Thus a small halogen or incandescent tube light illuminates just a “hot spot” in the top and center of the music but provides little, if any, lighting at the sides. Piano lamps should provide even lighting from top to bottom without producing glare, shining in the eyes of the pianist (or anyone else), or spilling light to where it is not needed.

An overhead light at least twenty inches long which reaches over and in front of the music is ideal lighting for a musician. A well-designed LED (light-emitting diode) lamp with multiple LEDs spread across the width of a light tube is an ideal source of illumination for musicians. LED lamps have the further benefits of being thin and thus unobtrusive, cool, use little energy, and do not need bulb replacement (LEDs typically have a useful life of over 50,000 hours of operation). LEDs are further environmentally friendly as, unlike fluorescent lights, they contain no mercury or other heavy metals.

Spinet-type and grand pianos need different type of lights. Spinet pianos have  lids, or tops, on which the base of an overhead lamp can rest. Grand pianos have no convenient horizontal surface so a well-designed grand piano lamp needs to be lightweight and able to be clamped onto the top of the music rack. Such a lamp is also very portable and can also be used on music stands.

Wolcraft's Ektralamp line of lights for musicians includes a lightweight LED-based grand piano lamp available in brushed aluminum or black, and a handsome spinet piano lamp made of solid satin brass mounted on an exquisite solid cherry base.

The lamps may be viewed and purchased at http://www.ektralamp.com

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About Wolcraft. We are a company dedicated to making ideal lighting products for musicians and the arts community. Each lamp is lovingly hand crafted at our shop in Cleveland Ohio.