Music Articles

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:58 PM

If one examines the average guitar, either electric or acoustic, one will find small raised bars running width-wise across the instrument's neck. These bars are called frets, and they are placed on stringed instruments to allow the player to accurately and consistently determine where to depress a string in order to produce the desired note. However, not all guitars use frets in the same way; in fact, some lack frets completely. And although such guitars are fairly uncommon, they are by no ... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:49 PM

It sometimes happens that a certain group of people will become associated with a certain ability or skill. People from Norway or Sweden, for example, are often assumed to be excellent skiers. If individuals are from South America, they are sometimes presupposed to be exceptional dancers. Sometimes such assumptions, which are essentially stereotypes, are inaccurate and unfair. But sometimes they are right on the money. This is true in the case of the Ewe, a group of people who live in Togo, Beni... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:45 PM

When the electric guitar was originally created back in the 1930s, the main intent was simply to create an instrument that could be heard over the increasingly large jazz orchestras. It is highly doubtful that the instrument's inventors could ever have imagined the uses to which their creation would someday be put. The modern electric guitar is a source of an apparently unending array of tones, pitches and sounds. Artists have pushed the instrument's limits in an attempt to find new an... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:43 PM

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. The appearance of the ten-string guitar is similar in that it simply seems to have sprouted a few extra strings. Fortunately for music lovers, there is nothing unnatural about the ten-string guitar. While certain aspects... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:43 PM

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 rec... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:41 PM

Certainly, if presented with an acoustic guitar and an electric guitar, most people can identify which is which. After all, while the acoustic instrument has a large hole in the middle, the body of the electric instrument is smooth and apparently solid. (Some electric guitars are solid core, some are hollow and some are a combination of both, but that is beside the point in this instance). At any rate, acoustic and electric are easy to tell apart on sight. And of course, the sound of the electri... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:33 PM

The drum kit is one of the defining symbols of rock and roll. A set of usually four or five drums, these instruments are as memorable for their look as for their music. Yet when listening to a drummer rip through a drum solo, it is not just the sounds of the drums that stand out, but the sounds of other percussion instruments as well. Drum kits can include a number of other percussion possibilities besides the drum, including cowbells, wood blocks, triangles, chimes, tambourines and of course, c... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:30 PM

My father attempted to teach me to play the guitar when I was about eight years old. I was not very interested, especially when I realized that becoming a skilled musician would require a fair amount of time and effort. However, fortunately for me, I didn't have to get out of it by complaining; I had a legitimate excuse. Try as I might, my hands were just too small to be able to deal with the strings along the fingerboard. The fingerboard (also known as a fretboard) is the long, thin part o... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:27 PM

Rock and roll artists have a tendency to think that they invented the concept of rebellion. That before their genre came along, everything was goody-two-shoes and Miss Manners. What they forget is that the music industry has always been a place of innovation a source of social uproar. Even the waltz, when it was first introduced, was considered an outrage at first because of how close couples had to get to dance to it! Yes, rock and roll artists are just following in the industry's grand tr... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:25 PM

There are lots of reasons that people opt to learn to play the guitar rather than another instrument. It may have to do with a preference for country music over that of orchestras. They may be drawn to the potential volume of the electric guitar or the portability of its acoustic cousin. Or maybe they just think guitars look cool. Yes, ever since they first became "sexy" via the genre of rock and roll (thank you Elvis Presley), guitars have had a certain element of "coolness" tha... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:22 PM

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." But I must admit would be curious to know how many people, when asked what they associate with this word, would come up wit... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:21 PM

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...you name it, the world of drums has it. But perhaps you find certain kind of drum music more moving than others. Perhaps you prefer the crisp sound of the snare; or maybe the resounding boom of the odaiko speaks to you; or perhaps the upbeat resonance of the bongos suits yo... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:20 PM

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. However, in essence, a harp guitar looks like a guitar with an additional, elongated neck coming out of the top. The strings of this second neck mimic the strings of a harp. This description hardly does the ... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:10 PM

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. This second notion is partially correct, but it is far from the full truth of the matter. These bars, which are called frets, divide the neck of a guitar into fixed segments at intervals. These intervals are related to a musical... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 1:00 PM

"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." Our culture abounds with idioms that seek to emphasize the idea that "It's what's inside that counts." Yet on some level, we all know that beauty is bankable. The high esteem in which we hold artists, the power and money accorded to fashion models, the thousands of people who flock to the Metropolitan Museum of Art every day-al... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 12:52 PM

The term "headstock" is one of those words that has come to have completely different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. If you look up this word in the dictionary, you find "a bearing or pedestal of a revolving or moving part." However, if you it up in reference to its use in guitar terminology, you find that it refers to the bulbous portion used to hold the strings at the end of a guitar neck. Clearly, the two meanings have little to do with each other, the ... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 12:33 PM

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. The drumhead is the thin membrane that is stretched over one... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 12:30 PM

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. A mellotron has a bank of magnetic a... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 12:13 PM

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. This piece of laminated material resides under the guitar's strings on the instrument's body. Its purpose is to prevent the guitar's finish from being scratched ... more...

Music | By Victor Epand @ Monday, 15th September 2008 @ 12:10 PM

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. But some guitar components cannot be seen at all because they are hidden inside of the instrument. This is the case with the truss rod, a metal rod that runs along the inside of a guitar's neck. This part of the guitar has existed since at least the early 1900s, although it was not patented until 1921. Despit... more...