A similar, but more complicated instrument is the zither. This is a folk instrument from northern Europe that has thirty to forty strings stretched across a flat, hollow sound box. The four top strings are used for playing the melody, while the rest of the strings are plucked and strummed to provide the accompaniment. The right hand plucks and strums, and the left hand stops the melody strings against the frets of a guitarlike fingerboard.

When Johann Strauss composed his famous waltz Tales from the Vienna Woods, he included a charming solo for the zither in the orchestral score. (More…)

dodoFolk Music, Guitar, Jazz, Music Box, Popular Music10 Oct, 20082 Comments

In addition to the notes of the four “open” strings, the players make many other notes by stopping the string with the fingers of their left hands. When a string is pressed against the fingerboard, its length is shortened, and a higher sound is produced. The closer to the sound box the finger is pressed, the higher the note. There is nothing on the fingerboard to tell a player exactly where to place his fingers (that is, unlike a guitar, a violin has no frets); he must listen very carefully and practise hard to learn where the right spots are for each note. (More…)

dodoBrass, Guitar, Jazz, Music Box, Percussion Instruments, Popular Music, Violin, Woodwinds7 Oct, 20082 Comments

All the instruments of the flute family are very similar. Their sound is produced by a vibrating air column, they are all fingered the same way, and they are made from metal. Although it is a small family and the instruments can’t play very loudly, the flute family has an important place in both our musical heritage and the music of today.

Instruments of the clarinet family are perhaps the most versatile and useful of the woodwinds. Descendants of a family of seventeenth-century instruments called shawms, shalmeys, or chalumeaux, their sounds are produced by blowing air across a single reed. (More…)

dodoJazz, Popular Music, Saxophone, Violin, Woodwinds1 Oct, 20082 Comments

One of the most fascinating families of instruments is found in the very last row of the orchestra—the percussion section. Any instrument whose sound is made by striking or used only for special sound effects, or is not a member of one of the other instrument families is naturally assigned to the percussion section. Since it contains instruments of many different shapes, sizes, and sounds, the percussion section has been given the nickname “kitchen of the orchestra“. (More…)

dodoDrums, Musical Instruments, Percussion Instruments, Popular Music27 Sep, 20085 Comments

The saxophone has to be treated as a family of seven instruments of different sizes, each one covering 4 octaves and all seven a compass of 51 octaves. Saxophones look like outsize metal tobacco pipes supported by neck slings, apart from the sopranos which are shorter, parabolic cones. All have a single reed, clarinet-type mouthpiece. Classed as woodwinds, though made of brass, their part is written in a treble clef on a stave beneath the clarinets. (More…)

dodoBrass, Home Theater, Jazz, Multimedia, Music Book, Music Equipments, Music Software, Piano, Popular Music, Saxophone, Sheet Music, Woodwinds25 Aug, 20083 Comments

Before Bach, trumpeters were classified as principals and clarino players, the former playing in the lower register with its widely-stepped harmonics, the latter in the high register where the harmonics lie close together. Shanks and crooks were already used as early as 1600 and by the end of the 18th century there were crooks for every key. These altered the timbre of the instrument, and there was some degree of energy loss as the vibrating air column negotiated the loops. Then came the valves, introducing more loops, and someone writing at the time of their application, towards the end of the 19th century, described them as ‘a failure as they obscure the upper harmonics, the main source of characteristic tone’. (More…)

dodoBass Guitar, Brass, Drums, Guitar, Jazz, Musical Instruments, Popular Music, Trumpet14 Aug, 20083 Comments

The organ is the earliest known of all mechanically operated musical instruments and not, as is sometimes stated, one of the earliest musical instruments. The first known organ dates from the 3rd century BC. This was a hydraulos, with a clever system of maintaining wind pressure by incorporating a water cistern in the wind reservoir; when the wind pressure sank, the water level rose to maintain it. (More…)

dodoHome Theater, Music Equipments, Piano, Popular Music3 Aug, 20083 Comments

An immense variety of harps have been played in different countries at different times. One of the most important is the triple harp, a high-headed frame type with three ranks of strings, the outer two providing the diatonic notes of the scale and the inner, the accidentals. This was known in the 4th century and was the first fully chromatic harp. Like the old Irish harp it had a clear, bell-like sound, the technique in this case being to strike rather than to pluck or pull the strings. It was played well into the 20th century in Wales and was known as the Welsh harp. The only known scoring for it was in Handel’s Esther. (More…)

dodoCD Player, Classical Music, Country Music, Folk Music, Hip Hop Music, Music Box, Music Equipments, Musical Instruments, Popular Music23 Jul, 20084 Comments

The part for the double bass is written on the bottom stave of the score. The notes sound an octave lower than written. Unlike any other member of the violin family the strings are tuned in fourths — GDAE; this is because with strings of such length and thickness the intervals between the stopped notes are very wide and if they were tuned to the usual fifths there would be insuperable physical difficulties in fingering. The greater length of thicker string gives a smaller, not wider, compass on account of the notes being so widely spaced. The compass is about two and a quarter octaves. (More…)

dodoMusic Equipments, Popular Music, String Instruments, Violin15 Jul, 20085 Comments