"Why 'Air Guitar' Is the New Karaoke"

Summary: This article starts with talking about how a guy called Craig Billmeier won a tournament on who the best air guitar player is. It's all about who can be the best to rock out as playing a air guitar. He won the first part of the tournament and and by that he got a free ticket to Finland to finish of the rest of the tournament. Also thought out the story explains what they need to do to win that competition.

Analysis: The article show how the influence of the guitar has created an imaginary act of playing a guitar and rocking out called the air guitar and how people made a competition out of it.

Reflection Question: How can something some simple be made into a competition. 


Citation: Couch, C. (2006, June 30). Why 'air guitar' is the new karaoke. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR . Retrieved from http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=SFL2086-0-4692&artno=0000249740&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=Guitar&title=Why 'Air Guitar' Is the New Karaoke&res=N&ren=Y&gov=Y&lnk=Y&ic=N

"Waukesha Guitar Legend Les Paul Dies at 94"

Summary: This article talks about that Les Paul, an inventor and a guitarist, died at age 92 and summarizes how he had the idea of making a guitar that amplifies from using pickups and an amplifier. Also it mentions some of the people he influenced to play guitar. Not only did he invent the electric guitar but he also invented a way to record music which is used in a studio. He got home objects and created thing like a microphone, by using his moms speaker from her phone and placing it in the end of a broom stick and connecting it to his fathers radio. He noticed that when hearing bands on the radio he couldn't hear the guitarist play with the acoustics guitar and he though it needed an extra boost. And that's when he came up with the electric guitar. As he was playing guitar more in the future he noticed that the guitar didn't need the soundboard with the pickups so he changed the design to a more solid body.

 Analysis: This contributes to my question of "How the guitar influence the world" by showing how a very intelligent inventor of technology was influenced by the guitar. He took an interest in the instrument and noticed some flaws in its design, that the soundboard was a good way to increase the sound but he thought that using the process of amplification it would be better to hear the sound. He was a young boy and he though and did all this things no one else though of. 

Reflex Question: How did such a young boy come up with such an influential instrument?


CItations:Walker, D. (2009, August 13). Waukesha guitar legend les paul dies at 94. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel . Retrieved from http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=SFL2086-0-4692&artno=0000295118&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=Guitar&title=Waukesha Guitar Legend Les Paul Dies at 94&res=N&ren=Y&gov=Y&lnk=Y&ic=N

"Six String Heroes"

Summary:  This article talks about how a group of volunteer guitar teachers called "Six String Heroes" teach veterans how to play guitar. What they do is called recreational therapy not music therapy, although they say it mirrors what music therapy does. It helps veterans focus on what to play instead of focusing on what they went trough during their time in the war or what has happened to them like losing a leg or causing brain trauma.

Analysis: From this article you can see learning a guitar can influence a "cure" to veterans that had to go through the horrible things that happen in war and go through the agony of having lost a limb or just the sickness of waking up to the remembrance of a tragic event that happened while in the war.

Reflection Question: If the power of learning a guitar can help a veteran get his mind off of what happened during war. Which other type of people with problems can it help?


Citations: Gregorian, C. (2011, July 14). Six string heroes. Retrieved from http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=SFL2086-0-4692&artno=0000316089&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=guitar&title=Six String Heroes&res=N&re

Brief History of the Guitar - Guitar Lessons - Guitar History - Brief Overview (video)

Summary: This video talks about the history of the guitar and all that has contributed to shape it on what it is today. It gives information like the years, the people, and the many types of guitar like instruments that have been presented in the past. 

Analysis: This video can give you a great view of it history. Its amazing of how many contribution it took to make such an instrument and how many years it took to perfect it. It shows you how that guitar is an instrument that still hasn't stop changing and will keep on changing for the years to come. The most latest change and the biggest change to the guitar is the creation of the electric guitar. The electric guitar was created in the 1930s and after its invention it has created many different genres that would have been impossible to have existed in the past.

Refection question: What changes did the electric guitar have on other instruments like the bass and the drums.

Citation: Youtube. (2006, April 21). Brief history of the guitar - guitar lessons - guitar history - brief overview. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgD0q1YkpxY

Electric-Acoustic Guitars

Summary: The article talks about how people always tried to make the volume of a guitar louder and one of the most successful ways that this was done is the creation of the electric amplifier. People in the 1920s and 1930s just simply put pickups to an acoustic guitar. Electric-guitar pioneers tried a variety of ways to pick up the instrument's sound and amplify it. George Beauchamp and Paul Barth developed the first successful electromagnetic pickup system. The electromagnetic are installed under the strings, they sense the strings' vibrations and convert them into electrical signals that travel through a cable to the amplifier to increase the sound.

Analysis: As you can see from reading this article the youngest popular guitar is the electric guitar, it was created around the 30's. By just applying a little machine on the guitar created a whole new instrument and many new types of  genres of music.

Reflection Question:  How did they come up with such an invention.




Citations: Smith , M., & Sturm, G. (1996). The invention of the electric guitar. Retrieved from http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/electricguitar/guitars_work.htm

"Pablo Picasso, Guitar Hero."

Summary: This article talks about how the artist Pablo Picasso with his friend Georges Braque invented the art type cubism and how the art was such a big failure that it was such a success. In his art he painted guitars within most of his paintings. He liked to paint guitars because it had the curve and the straight lines that he had put in to his painting. The curve is from the curves of the body of the Spanish guitar and the straight lines are from the strings of the guitar. He also like to paint guitars because the instrument is played very close to the person and on his painting that was the idea of mixing two in to one.

Analysis: The example of this article is the mixture of two worlds. Picasso was a painter that loved to paint the guitar in his paintings. It's what separated him from the other painter that painted cubism. Cubism is a type of painting that has the massage of music, architecture, and literature. The mixture of the guitar world and the painting world. Two very artistic worlds but different in many ways.

Reflection question: How do the two worlds differ?


Citations: Gopnik, B. (2011, Febuary 28). Pablo picasso, guitar hero. Newsweek, Retrieved from http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=SFL2086-0-4692&artno=0000312110&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=guitar&title=Pablo Picasso, Guitar Hero&res=N&ren=Y&gov=Y&lnk=Y&ic=N

A Brief History of the Guitar

   The first image ever seen of a guitar like instrument is 3,300 years old. It's a carving on a stone of a Hittite bard playing an instrument that is stringed, has a body like a guitar, and a neck. All the features a modern guitar has. The guitar has been said to have been influenced from the lute. The lute is like a guitar but much smaller and the neck is much shorter. It also has six strings and a soundboard to make the sound of the string hear able. Both have the same tuning system that is at the end of the neck. It's hard to believe that the guitar could not have been influenced by such a similar instrument.

Citations: Guitar. (2012, April 10). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar