archives

Taylor Swift - Love Story

Taylor Swift - Love Story

Harp Guitars - A Strange Breed

Harp guitars are extremely interesting and odd-looking instruments. Quite frankly, if a guitar and a harp were to have a baby, it would look like this instrument: hence the name, I suppose. It is difficult to describe a harp guitar, far better that one should actually look the instrument up.

The Award For Most Improved - The Electronic Drum

There are lots of different associations that can be made with the word "drum." Depending on your age, where in the world you are from and what kind of music you listen to, you may picture anything from a Caribbean steel drum to a Chinese "fou" drum when you hear that word. Yes, there are a great many faces to the instrument commonly known as "drum.

The Many Sounds of the Drum

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different kinds of drums existing in the world today. Rather like a Dr. Seuss book, there are tall ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones, loud ones, soft ones, light ones, heavy ones.

Guitar Frets - Not Always a Straight Shot

Most people do not realize the full significance of the little metal bars that span the width of most guitar necks. Some assume that they are simply for decorative purposes. Others believe them to indicate the locations at which a guitarist must place his or her fingers.

How to Make the Body of a Frame Drum

Making the body of a frame drum isn't too difficult. People need to make them for various reasons; a class project, a certain authenticity in their musical instruments, or just because they think it's cool. At any rate, it's not that hard.

Guitar Amps - For the "Plugged" Performance

In recent years, there has been a respectable surge in the popularity of "unplugged" performances. Such exhibitions, as one might assume from the name, feature artists in small venues performing acoustically for small audiences. One interesting aspect to these performances is that sometimes the artists perform on electric guitars without using amplifiers.

The Mellotron - A Child of the 60s

The word "mellotron" (the word is also a trademark and therefore sometimes capitalized) sounds to me like some kind of robot that would be encountered on the original Star Trek series. It's not, of course, but is rather an electro-mechanical polyphonic (able to produce more than one note simultaneously) keyboard. The only resemblance between this instrument and Star Trek is that they are both the progeny of that age of experimentation, the 1960s.

Truss Rods - Good Posture For Guitars

There are a great many physical components that make up a guitar. Some, such as strings and fingerboards, are obvious. Others, like nuts, are less apparent, but they are still visible.

Grand Piano - Choosing an Acoustic Piano

There are a lot of options when choosing an acoustic piano. Verticals come in a variety of sizes and then there is the baby grand and grand piano. When choosing an instrument, factors to consider include purpose, ability, affordability and space.

Pickguards - It's What's Outside That Counts

Guitars are made up of many parts and pieces. Fingerboards, soundboards, strings, headstocks-all of these components are essential to a guitar and all have an affect on the instrument's music. Yet there is at least one piece of the guitar that has absolutely no influence on the sound of the instrument: the pickguard.

Luthiers - Creators of Beautiful Music

Beauty is only skin deep. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.

The Drumhead - From Rawhide to Kevlar

If you're anything like me, you think of a drum as a single entity, an easily definable instrument of simple construction. Yet the fact is that drums really consist of at least three separate and distinct parts: the shell, the "hoop" or "rim" and the drumhead. And it is this last component that produces the sounds we all associate with the drum, the rolls and resonances that so strongly characterize the instrument.

Conga Drums - A Confusing But Moving Family

Conga drums are an integral part of most Latin American music. In North America, everyone has heard of a conga line and unfortunately, most of us have been forced to join one at one point or another, often during a wedding reception. But the music of the conga is far too diverse to be pigeonholed as wedding reception music.

The Features of the Common Keyboard

There is a great deal of difference between a musical synthesizer used by professional musicians and an electronic keyboard used by a typical amateur. While the former is an electronic instrument capable of producing a variety of sounds through the generation and combination of signals of varying frequencies, the latter is basically an inexpensive sampler. The difference between a sampler and a synthesizer is that a sampler does not create sounds from scratch, but rather starts with multiple recordings and plays them back in various sound configurations.

The Tambourine - The Unknown Drum

I have to admit it, I did not know that the tambourine was originally, and sometimes still is, a type of drum. I mean, it's obviously a percussion instrument, anyone can see that. But it wasn't until I started to look at the surprising variety of tambourines in the world that I realized that it is, at least in its classic form, a drum.

The Advantages of the Modern Ten-String Guitar

When comparing a ten-string guitar to a standard classical six-string guitar, I'm afraid that first analogy that occurs to me is that of the recent mutant frogs. These amphibians, as the result of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from farms and ranches, have grown extra legs.

Flattop Vs Archtop Guitars - Sound Holes and Soundboards

An explanation of how an archtop guitar differs from a flattop instrument. A brief history of the former instrument and a list of the modern models defining characteristics.

The "Beating Guitar" of Italy

The battente guitar is also known as the chitarre battente, which in Italian, translates literally as "beating guitar." (One can only assume that the verb in this translation refer to the action used to play the guitar rather than the instrument's use as a club.) At first glance, the battente guitar is very similar to the common classical guitar.