Archive for the ‘Instruments’ Category
My Daughter The Bass Player
My daughter is a musical genius. She can pick up any instrument and start playing. So when she wanted to start a band how could I say no? What I wasn’t prepared for was the new instrument that she wanted to pick up.
She decided that she was going to be the bass player in her band. Her band would practice everyday after school. They were quit entertaining with their song choices and costumes. She went through quit a few bass strings throughout the weeks. As she would say to me “ I am a hard core rocker.”
Whether you are a lefty or a righty, truth be told lefties have a little bit harder time when it comes to supplies. It’s not as easy to find things like scissors, left handed school supplies, and left handed computer accessories just to name a few. Most of the common things you have to go to a specialty store or order it online.
My mother is a lefty and she told me that she would take trips to Pier 39 and go to the Everything Lefty Shop. That way she could stock up on what she needed. When I went to visit her she took me to the store and because I wanted to show people back home that you can get anything left handed I purchased two left handed banjos. It is quit a conversation piece.
Ukuleles are traditionally made out of wood, although varieties have been made entirely of plastic. Cheaper ukuleles are made from ply or laminate woods. Some cases, it can come with a soundboard made out of spruce, which is an acoustically superior wood.
There are multiple sizes of a ukulele. The most common are the soprano ukulele, concert ukulele, tenor ukulele, and the baritone ukulele. The standard ukulele is the soprano. This type is the smallest, which is the standard size. In 1920 is when the concert size was developed, which is the soprano. The largest is the baritone, which was created in 1940.
Okay, I have to confess, there was a time, years ago, that I was a “stomp box” junkie and bought every new fangled pedal that came out. Yes, I had a pedal board. And yes, the rest of the band was set up and ready for sound check before I had all those pedals hooked up and tweaked!
Then came the digital age and everything changed. Legions of engineers designed pedals with a plethora of effects built into a compact package. Suddenly the need to acquire a multitude of guitar effects pedals was abolished.
Even so, many guitarists – especially fans of the Eastman guitars, like me – still prefer the use of analog stomp boxes over their digital counterpart. Talk to ten different guitar players and you’ll get ten different answers as to the merits of one over the other.
You still haven’t gotten the right gift for your friend’s birthday? They also happen to be a musician? Here are some great gift ideas.
~Electric Guitar – Who can resist the electric power and energy that channel through the wiring of this amped music machine? They’ll feel like Slash in no time.
~IPod – These awesome music and media devices are the heart’s desire of musicians and everywhere; rest assured if they don’t have one they want one.
~Gibson Banjos – A unique and magical instrument for any musician; it’s an amazing present, especially if they can already play the guitar.
The Mother of Folk, , is truly an inspiration. Jean was the youngest of 14 children and slept in one room with her nine sisters in the family’s farm house in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky. As a child she memorized many of the songs that would be influential during her recording career. After graduating from Cumberland College she moved to New York and began to sing her family songs on albums.
The singer and scholar (she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright scholarship) sang primarily unaccompanied folk songs. Occasionally she would play guitar or lap dulcimer. It wound up being the use of dulcimers that distinguished Ritchie from other musicians in her genre. In fact, she got the name for her 1992 album, “The Most Dulcimer,” after fans would repeatedly ask her, “Which album has the most dulcimer?”
Whenever I travel, I like to learn about the native music. Naturally, when I visited Hawaii I decided to investigate ukulele music. The friends I was staying with during my break recommended listening to the work of the late great Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo‘ole.
The first song they played for me was the ukulele medley of “Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World.” I instantly recognized the song from a variety of movies and television commercials. Intrigued, I started listening to all of his albums chronologically. I particularly enjoyed how he blended other musical genres, like jazz and reggae, into his songs. Kamakawiwo‘ole died in 1997 from weight-related respiratory illness. Ten thousand people attended his funeral and he was only the third person in Hawaiian history to lie in state at the Capitol building.
The term steel guitar refers both to a type of guitar and a method of playing guitar. Steel guitars are held horizontally with strings facing up towards the player, who in turn uses a slide called “steel” above the fingerboard. In other words, the player’s fingers don’t pluck or fret the strings. Any guitar can be played in this manner, though guitars specifically built for steel guitar playing produce the best sound.
Steel guitar was popularized in Hawaii during the 19th and 20th centuries. During the 1950s and 60s the steel guitar enjoyed immense popularity. Due to its origins, the steel guitar is sometimes referred to as a Hawaiian guitar or Hawaiian steel guitar; however, in Hawaii the term Hawaiian guitar refers to a slack string guitar. It is thought that the design of the bottleneck guitar may have been inspired by steel guitar technique.
Harps have always had a strong presence in Irish society. Even today that is evidenced by the harp being present on the Irish Euro coins. Though the old Gaelic harp tradition has mostly died out, a new harp tradition has been carried through from the 19th century.
John Egan, a Dublin pedal harp maker, created an Irish harp with gut strings and semitone mechanisms like an orchestral pedal harp. The strings and soundbox were modern, though the overall shape mimicked that of its predecessor. These harps are referred to as clarsach in English, though in Ireland they are called Irish harp or clairseach. Scotland, too, experienced a revival in cultural Gaelic that resulted in a new harp design.
It’s no secret that the ukulele is most commonly associated with Hawaiian music. But, did you know that the instrument was derived from a combination of two Portuguese instruments? Two very different instruments in deed: the braguinha and the cavaquinho. There’s speculation as to how this hybrid-style instrument came to be exactly, but rumor has it that a Portuguese traveler arrived in Hawaii carrying a similar instrument, which caught the eye of the locals.
In Hawaiian, the name ukulele can be defined as “jumping flea.” There are many theories about how this instrument’s name came to be. Some include the idea that it was a trait of the traveling passenger’s demeanor or the way a players fingers jump around from string to string while playing the ukulele. Even if the origination of the ukulele and its name are still a mystery, one thing is certain – ukuleles became popular, and fast, within the Hawaiian culture.