Sunday, April 29, 2012

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


Sunday, April 22, 2012

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

Sunday, April 15, 2012

"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

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

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