A Brief History of Musical Instruments

Acoustic Bass Guitar ... Because it can be difficult to hear an acoustic bass guitar without an amplifier, even in settings with other acoustic instruments, most acoustic basses have pickups, either magnetic or piezoelectric or both, so that they can be amplified with a bass amp. Traditional music of Mexico features several varieties of acoustic bass guitars, such as the bajo sexto, with six pairs of strings, and the guitarrón, a very large, deep-bodied Mexican 6-string acoustic bass guitar played in Mariachi bands...

Marching Band ... Marching bands are generally categorized by function, size, age, and by the style of show they perform. In addition to traditional parade performances, many marching bands also perform field shows at special events like competitions...

History Of The Classical Guitar ... Juan Bermudo published Declaración de Instrumentos Musicales in 1555, a treatise containing a section on plucked string instruments...

School Band ... School bands tend to be more common in the United States than others due to a vast increase in funding to music education in recent years. School bands in the United Kingdom are generally similar to those in the US although pure brass bands are more commonplace in schools than in the US...

Guitarrón Mexicano ... The guitarrón mexicano (literally "Mexican large guitar" in Spanish, the suffix "-ón" denoting "large") or Mexican guitarron, is a very large, deep-bodied Mexican 6-string acoustic bass played traditionally in mariachi groups. Although obviously similar to the guitar, it is not a derivative of that instrument, but was independently developed from the sixteenth-century Spanish bajo de uña...

Resonator Guitar ... Resonator guitars are of two styles: Square necked guitars designed to be played in steel guitar style. Round necked guitars, which may be played in either the conventional classical guitar style or in the lap steel guitar style...

Drum Screen ... Drum screens are usually made out of a 0.22-inch (5.6mm) thick clear perspex sheet material. In parts of the US, the transparent material used is sometimes called acrylic...

Fret ... On instruments such as guitars, each fret represents one semitone in the standard western system where one octave is divided into twelve semitones...

Harp Guitar ... Electric harp guitars While most players of harp guitars play on acoustic instruments, a few of them also work with electric instruments... Viennese and French virtuosos who often played instruments with extra, floating bass strings include Carulli, Coste, Giuliani, Mertz, Padovec and Sor...

Bass Drum ... Davuls were ideal for use as military instruments because of the unique way in which they could be carried...

Drum Hardware ... Stands and holders Metal stands and holders are used to support percussion instruments or microphones...

Fingerboard ... In Italian it is called either manico or tasto, the latter especially in the phrase sul tasto, a direction for bowed string instruments to play with the bow above the fingerboard...

Musical Ensemble ... Six or more instruments Classical chamber ensembles for more than six musicians are occasionally used, such as septets (seven musicians), octets (eight musicians), or nonets (nine musicians)...

Grip (percussion) ... For some instruments, such as triangles and large gongs, only one mallet or beater is normally used, held either in one hand, or in both hands for larger beaters; For others such as snare drums often two beaters are used, one in each hand. More rarely, more than one beater may be held in one hand, for example when four mallets are used on a vibraphone, or when a kit drummer performs a cymbal roll by holding two soft sticks in one hand while keeping a rhythm with the other...

Pickup (music Technology) ... The external load usually consists of resistance (the volume and tone potentiometer in the guitar, and any resistance to ground at the amplifier input) and capacitance between the hot lead and shield in the guitar cable. The electric cable also has a capacitance, which can be a significant portion of the overall system capacitance...

Classical Guitar ... The phrase "classical guitar" is ambiguous in that it might refer at least three different concepts: the instrumental technique — the individual strings are usually plucked with the fingernails or rarely without nails. its historic repertoire — though this is of lesser importance, since any repertoire can be (and is) played on the classical guitar (additionally: classical guitarists are known to borrow from the repertoires of a wide variety of instruments) its shape, construction and material excluding three strings made of nylon — modern classical guitar shape, or historic classical guitar shapes (e.g...

Drum Kit ... Most drummers extend their kits from this basic pattern, adding more drums, more cymbals, and many other instruments... The bass drum, snare drum, cymbals and other percussion instruments were all played using hand-held drum sticks... Liberating the hands for the first time, this evolution saw the bass drum played (first standing) with the foot of a percussionist and became the central piece around which every other percussion instruments would later revolve...

Selmer Guitar ... However, some modern builders of Selmer-style instruments (including Canadian luthier Michael Dunn, who uses his own design) have resurrected the feature...

Flamenco Guitar ... In contrast to the classical guitar, the flamenco is often equipped with a tap plate (a golpeador), commonly made of plastic, similar to a pick guard, whose function is to protect the body of the guitar from the rhythmic finger taps, or golpes. Even so, a well used Flamenco guitar only survives so long before the constant "golpes" wear through the top...