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October 04, 2008
There are voice problems like hoarseness, sore throats, drainage from allergies---and all of these can be diagnosed and treated by an experienced doctor who has ideally treated singers. Don't attempt to diagnose yourself from other singers’ ailments or injuries as you might try to treat ..
October 04, 2008
Face it: we're fascinated by ghosts. Especially this time of year, during the season of Halloween and the Day of the Dead. Whether as metaphors or as intimations of our mortality, you don't need to necessarily believe in ghosts to appreciate them. These ten songs and CDs represent a variety of ..
October 04, 2008
A hobby is something that you enjoy doing, something that brings relief of the daily grind and allows you to unwind. Many people turn to music as their form of release. Music is among the most popular of all hobbies. There are several different ways to enjoy music as your hobby. Even if you can't ..
October 04, 2008
When learning guitar online it is important that you use a guitar teaching website that provides you with a wide range of options: options on guitar type, on style of play and even options on the guitar teacher you want to use.Without these options you would be just as well purchasing a guitar ..
October 04, 2008
There are many sites that offer online guitar lessons for kids, but you have to be careful that you choose one that doesn't try to go too fast, and also understands that your child might be playing less than a full sized guitar. That can make a big difference when trying to teach children guitar, ..
October 04, 2008
So you want to learn to play guitar. Learning guitar is not difficult, and it is not easy, and is basically a matter of degree: how good do you want to be? The higher your goals then the more work you have to do and the more difficult it becomes.But even then it is not difficult as such, but more a .
October 04, 2008
If you want to learn guitar, you have a variety of methods of doing so. Let's have a look at each of these and compare them for effectiveness.1. BooksWay back in the 1960s when the guitar became popular as an instrument, a whole load of guitar learning books came onto the market. It was towards the .
October 04, 2008
If you want to know how to learn blues guitar, you are first advised to be able to play basic guitar. You will not pick up a guitar and start playing blues from scratch, because you need to understand both how to hold and play your guitar, and also a little about music theory to understand what ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 .
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
Electronic keyboard synthesizers have come a long way since their inception. Few people know that the first electronic synthesizer was invented in the late 1800s. This model was, of course, only a very rough precursor to the musical synthesizers of today. Modern synthesizers are capable of ..
October 03, 2008
When I was young, I always thought my father's guitar pick was the prettiest little thing. It was faux tortoise shell (although I didn't realize that at the time), and I was always driving him crazy by taking it out to play with and then forgetting to put it back where I found it. Even though I was .
October 03, 2008
If you want to be loose with your definitions, it is possible to say that guitars have existed for over five thousand years. Prior to the development of the electric guitar and the use of synthetic materials, a guitar was defined as an instrument having “a long, fretted neck, flat wooden ..
October 03, 2008
The image of a lead electric guitarist rocking out on a solo is probably one of the most ubiquitous images associated with the rock and roll industry. Whether you associate rock guitar solos with the afros, fringe and political turmoil of Jimi Hendrix's age or the spandex, makeup and general ..
October 03, 2008
When most people think of a synthesizer, they think of a machine used to reproduce the sounds of a piano via different electric frequencies-a keyboard. I know this is what I associate with the term. Yet synthesizers can be put to many different uses. Often, especially among the professionals of the .
October 03, 2008
If asked what they think of in association with the Caribbean, different people will probably tender wildly different answers: the sun, the beach, the food, the sheer sense of relaxation and of course, the alcohol. Yes, for those lucky enough to include the islands of the Caribbean among their ..
October 03, 2008
If you've ever lived in an apartment complex, or in a college dorm for that matter, it's almost a given that at some point, you've had to deal with noise neighbors. Loud footsteps, late night vacuuming sprees, noisy parties and of course, sound systems loud enough to break your windows. And if ..
October 03, 2008
Upon entering the term “goblet drum" into my search engine, the first thing that pops up is a picture of a simbati from Egypt. Despite the fact that I know it is a musical instrument, I am immediately struck by its physical beauty more than its musical potential. With a background the color ..
October 03, 2008
Sure, there are lots of types of drums in the world. Snare drums and bongo drums, bodhrans and ashikos, timbales and tenor drums-if you want to learn to play this instrument, you've got a lot of choices. But what if you want to go for sheer power? What if you want to play with the big boys and, ..
October 03, 2008
Does the artist make the electric guitar, or the electric guitar make the artist? I suspect the answer to that question would vary significantly depending on who you asked. A manufacturer such as Gibson, Fender, or Yamaha would probably reply that an artist can only be as good as his instrument. ..
October 03, 2008
Drums are one of the few, perhaps the only, musical instruments to earn a very unique distinction in human culture. Not only are they utilized for the traditional purpose of music, but they have been put to other uses as well. One of the most interesting of these alternative uses is that of music ..
October 03, 2008
The most common number of strings on a guitar is six. This number is simply the result of the natural evolution in the instrument, which has undergone an unknowable number of transformations over the past 5000 years or so. Of course, while six may be the most common number of strings on the modern ..
October 03, 2008
Bongo drums, usually just called bongos, are one of the most recognizable of percussion instruments. Due to the pervasive popularity of Latin music (thank you, “Dancing With the Stars"), the sounds of these little drums are familiar to people around the world. Bongos, as the name implies, ..
October 03, 2008
Can you learn to play the guitar without hiring a local guitar instructor to show you “the ropes" in person? Yes, yes you can! In fact it's easier than ever before to do just that because of the internet. In the old days you may have to learn only from books or from videos that were not ..
October 03, 2008
The Internet offers us so many different opportunities to learn these days, and learning to play guitar online is one of them. There is no longer a need to search your phone book for the perfect local teacher because you can literally teach yourself from the comforts of home. The problem is, you ..
October 03, 2008
A double neck guitar looks like a set of Siamese twins. With two separate and distinct necks and a single, wider-than-average body, the instrument really does appear to be two independent entities joined by a common body. This description is, in fact, not too far from the truth. The benefit of the ..
October 03, 2008
At first glance, a tenor guitar does not appear to differ greatly from a standard classical acoustic or electric guitar. The tenor's shape is (usually) similar to the more standard models, and so is its size. Upon closer inspection, however, a careful observer will note that this instrument has ..
October 03, 2008
The act of playing a guitar can be divided into three basic techniques: strumming, or brushing the fingers over the strings to create chords; flatpicking, or picking individuals notes with a plectrum; and fingerpicking, or picking the strings directly with the fingertips, fingernails or picks ..
October 03, 2008
The guitar has a seemingly endless number of incarnations, no doubt due to the instruments lengthy history and wide geographical use. One such incarnation is the Portuguese guitar, a plucked instrument with twelve strings strung in six courses of two strings each. The instrument is noticeably ..
October 03, 2008
The battente guitar is also known as the chitarre battente, which in Italian, translates literally as “beating guitar." (One can only assume that the verb in this translation refer to the action used to play the guitar rather than the instrument's use as a club.) At first glance, the battente .
October 03, 2008
If you are studying the piano, you'll find that there are many different styles of piano music out there today. Usually it is a great idea to learn as many styles as you can if you want to master the piano, and learning all of them is a great idea. When you are knowledgeably about various styles of .
October 03, 2008
Among the many divisions in the guitar family is that of flattop vs. archtop. Both terms are really quite self explanatory. A flattop guitar is one with a flat top, the part of the instrument usually referred to as the soundboard. The sound hole of a flattop guitar is found and placed under the ..
October 03, 2008
I have to admit it, I did not know that the tambourine was originally, and sometimes still is, a type of drum. I mean, it's obviously a percussion instrument, anyone can see that. But it wasn't until I started to look at the surprising variety of tambourines in the world that I realized that it is, .
October 03, 2008
Conga drums are an integral part of most Latin American music. In North America, everyone has heard of a conga line and unfortunately, most of us have been forced to join one at one point or another, often during a wedding reception. But the music of the conga is far too diverse to be pigeonholed ..
October 03, 2008
In recent years, there has been a respectable surge in the popularity of “unplugged" performances. Such exhibitions, as one might assume from the name, feature artists in small venues performing acoustically for small audiences. One interesting aspect to these performances is that sometimes ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
"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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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. ..
October 03, 2008
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 .
October 03, 2008
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 ..
October 03, 2008
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 ..
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