My Music And Song's

Posts Tagged ‘instruments’

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.

The guitar and blues go together like apple and pie — as if they were made for each other. And you could argue that they were. The guitar allows you to sing along with yourself (try that with a flute), and singing was the way the blues started. And it’s much easier to bring out on the front porch than a piano. It’s cheaper to own (or make yourself) than many other instruments, and that helped bring the blues to many poor folks — the people who really had the blues.
As the blues developed, guitar makers adopted features that helped bring out the qualities of the blues to even better effect. An electric guitar is played with two hands and leaves your mouth free to sing (as an acoustic does), but
electrics, with their skinnier strings, are easier to bend (a way of stretching the string while it’s ringing, producing a gradual, continuous rise in pitch), and electronic amplification helps project the guitar’s sound out into the audience of (often raucous and noisy) blues-loving listeners. In this chapter, I show you in detail why the blues and the guitar — both acoustic and electric — make great music together.
Because the blues was concentrated in the rural South, in the time before musical instruments adopted electricity, the earliest blues guitar music was played on acoustics. The “Delta blues” style was the first recognized style of the blues and consisted of strummed and plucked acoustic guitars with chords formed the same way as in other forms of folk music.