My Music And Song's

Posts Tagged ‘Guitar’

The acoustic guitar came to America in the 1850s, thanks mainly to immigrants from Eastern Europe. Guitar maker Christian Friedrich (C. F.) Martin left his native Germany because of dissatisfaction with the restrictive guilds that oversaw all instrument making back home.Meanwhile, factories were built to turn out inexpensive guitars by the dozens, and mail order catalogs like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward began selling five-dollar instruments.

In the nineteenth century the guitar was promoted as a parlor instrument for young ladies to play. In the time before phonographs and radio, music-making was a favorite amateur activity. Young women were especially encouraged to learn music as an important social skill. While the piano was large and ungainly, the guitar was small and sweet voiced  at the time, most guitars were far smaller than today’s jumbo models, and they were all strung with gut strings in the classical style. Because of this, the guitar was thought to be an ideal instrument for young ladies, and it soon became popular.

As stage performers began taking up the guitar in the early twentieth century, they clamored for louder instruments that could fill a concert hall. Guitar makers responded by making bigger guitars; others began experimenting with different shapes for the guitar’s body to improve bass response and volume. The Martin company made an important contribution in the teens with the introduction of their so-called D or Dreadnought guitar. With a wider lower bout (or half of the body), and with construction strong enough to withstand the newly introduced steel strings, the instrument was immediately popular for its loud bass volume and carrying power.

The history of the guitar includes periods of fantastic popularity followed by periods of decline. The eighteenth century proved a time of low ebb for the guitar, until at its end the double strings gave place to single ones, and the sixth string was added to create the familiar form of today’s guitar. Sheep’s gut was used for the first three strings. The basses were formed by winding silver-plated copper wire onto a core of silk thread.

With the sixth string came a new wave of popularity with the public, led and inspired by virtuoso players who also composed and wrote instruction methods for the guitar in its new form. The main centers were Vienna and Paris, and great players such as Mauro Giuliani (1781–1829) from Italy and Fernando Sor (1778–1839) from Spain were drawn to emigrate to the north where enthusiastic audiences and students awaited them. Both composed extensively for the guitar, and laid the foundation for the solo repertoire. Ferdinando Carulli (1770–1841) produced a guitar method that is used to this day, and the “25 Melodious Studies” of Matteo Carcassi (1792–1853) are still part of the standard student repertoire.

Following this great wave of popularity came a period of decline and neglect, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the guitar was little played and rarely heard in concert. It was really thanks to Francisco Tárrega (1852–1909) that public interest was again awakened.

The first notes to play on your guitar are the ones that get your guitar in tune. Don’t play anything — not a lick, not a rhythm figure — until your guitar is perfectly in tune with itself and the other instruments in the band. Playing out of tune can peg you as an amateur and cause musicians and non-musicians alike to cringe. So learn how to tune your instrument quickly, correctly, and painlessly, and everyone will be happy — especially you.

Basically, you have two ways to tune your guitar:

• To an outside reference: These sources include electronic tuners, a tuning fork, a pitch pipe, or another instrument (such as a piano, organ, electronic keyboard, or even a harmonica).
• To itself: By using the relative method, you tune all the strings to one string. (This method is covered in the section “Helping your guitar get in tune with itself.”)

In the relative method, your guitar may or may not be in tune with another instrument or concert , but the strings are in tune with each other. Anyone who doesn’t have perfect pitch (which is most of the world, including the world of musicians) won’t know.