1.
Guitar
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The guitar is a musical instrument classified as a fretted string instrument with anywhere from four to 18 strings, usually having six. The sound is projected either acoustically, using a wooden or plastic and wood box, or through electrical amplifier. It is typically played by strumming or plucking the strings with the fingers, the guitar is a type of chordophone, traditionally constructed from wood and strung with either gut, nylon or steel strings and distinguished from other chordophones by its construction and tuning. There are three types of modern acoustic guitar, the classical guitar, the steel-string acoustic guitar, and the archtop guitar. The tone of a guitar is produced by the strings vibration, amplified by the hollow body of the guitar. The term finger-picking can also refer to a tradition of folk, blues, bluegrass. The acoustic bass guitar is an instrument that is one octave below a regular guitar. Early amplified guitars employed a body, but a solid wood body was eventually found more suitable during the 1960s and 1970s. As with acoustic guitars, there are a number of types of guitars, including hollowbody guitars, archtop guitars and solid-body guitars. The electric guitar has had a influence on popular culture. The guitar is used in a variety of musical genres worldwide. It is recognized as an instrument in genres such as blues, bluegrass, country, flamenco, folk, jazz, jota, mariachi, metal, punk, reggae, rock, soul. The term is used to refer to a number of chordophones that were developed and used across Europe, beginning in the 12th century and, later, in the Americas. The modern word guitar, and its antecedents, has applied to a wide variety of chordophones since classical times. Many influences are cited as antecedents to the modern guitar, at least two instruments called guitars were in use in Spain by 1200, the guitarra latina and the so-called guitarra morisca. The guitarra morisca had a back, wide fingerboard. The guitarra Latina had a sound hole and a narrower neck. By the 14th century the qualifiers moresca or morisca and latina had been dropped, and it had six courses, lute-like tuning in fourths and a guitar-like body, although early representations reveal an instrument with a sharply cut waist
2.
Musical instrument
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A musical instrument is an instrument created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument, the history of musical instruments dates to the beginnings of human culture. Early musical instruments may have used for ritual, such as a trumpet to signal success on the hunt. Cultures eventually developed composition and performance of melodies for entertainment, Musical instruments evolved in step with changing applications. The date and origin of the first device considered an instrument is disputed. The oldest object that some refer to as a musical instrument. Some consensus dates early flutes to about 37,000 years ago, many early musical instruments were made from animal skins, bone, wood, and other non-durable materials. Musical instruments developed independently in many populated regions of the world, however, contact among civilizations caused rapid spread and adaptation of most instruments in places far from their origin. By the Middle Ages, instruments from Mesopotamia were in maritime Southeast Asia, development in the Americas occurred at a slower pace, but cultures of North, Central, and South America shared musical instruments. By 1400, musical instrument development slowed in areas and was dominated by the Occident. Musical instrument classification is a discipline in its own right, Instruments can be classified by their effective range, their material composition, their size, etc. However, the most common method, Hornbostel-Sachs, uses the means by which they produce sound. The academic study of instruments is called organology. Once humans moved from making sounds with their bodies—for example, by using objects to create music from sounds. Primitive instruments were designed to emulate natural sounds, and their purpose was ritual rather than entertainment. The concept of melody and the pursuit of musical composition were unknown to early players of musical instruments. A player sounding a flute to signal the start of a hunt does so without thought of the notion of making music. Musical instruments are constructed in an array of styles and shapes
3.
Electric guitar
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The vibrations of the strings are sensed by a pickup, of which the most common type is the magnetic pickup, which uses the principle of direct electromagnetic induction. The signal generated by a guitar is too weak to drive a loudspeaker, so it is plugged into a guitar amplifier before being sent to a loudspeaker. The output of a guitar is an electric signal. Invented in 1931, the electric guitar was adopted by jazz guitarists. Early proponents of the guitar on record included Les Paul, Lonnie Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, T-Bone Walker. During the 1950s and 1960s, the guitar became the most important instrument in pop music. It has evolved into an instrument that is capable of a multitude of sounds and styles in genres ranging from pop and rock to country music, blues and jazz. It served as a component in the development of electric blues, rock and roll, rock music, heavy metal music. Electric guitar design and construction vary greatly in the shape of the body and the configuration of the neck, bridge, Guitars may have a fixed bridge or a spring-loaded hinged bridge that lets players bend the pitch of notes or chords up or down or perform vibrato effects. The sound of a guitar can be modified by new playing techniques such as string bending, tapping, hammering on, using audio feedback, in a small group, such as a power trio, one guitarist switches between both roles. In larger rock and metal bands, there is often a rhythm guitarist, many experiments at electrically amplifying the vibrations of a string instrument were made dating back to the early part of the 20th century. Patents from the 1910s show telephone transmitters were adapted and placed inside violins, hobbyists in the 1920s used carbon button microphones attached to the bridge, however, these detected vibration from the bridge on top of the instrument, resulting in a weak signal. With numerous people experimenting with electrical instruments in the 1920s and early 1930s, Electric guitars were originally designed by acoustic guitar makers and instrument manufacturers. Some of the earliest electric guitars adapted hollow-bodied acoustic instruments and used tungsten pickups, the first electrically amplified guitar was designed in 1931 by George Beauchamp, the general manager of the National Guitar Corporation, with Paul Barth, who was vice president. The maple body prototype for the one-piece cast aluminum frying pan was built by Harry Watson, commercial production began in late summer of 1932 by the Ro-Pat-In Corporation, in Los Angeles, a partnership of Beauchamp, Adolph Rickenbacker, and Paul Barth. In 1934, the company was renamed the Rickenbacker Electro Stringed Instrument Company, in that year Beauchamp applied for a United States patent for an Electrical Stringed Musical Instrument and the patent was issued in 1937. The Electro-Spanish Ken Roberts provided players a full 25 scale, with 17 frets free of the fretboard and it is estimated that fewer than 50 Electro-Spanish Ken Roberts were constructed between 1933 and 1937, fewer than 10 are known to survive today. The need for the guitar became apparent during the big band era as orchestras increased in size, particularly when acoustic guitars had to compete with large
4.
Bass guitar
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The bass guitar is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb, by plucking, slapping, popping, strumming, tapping, thumping, or picking with a plectrum, often known as a pick. The bass guitar is similar in appearance and construction to a guitar, but with a longer neck and scale length. The four-string bass, by far the most common, is tuned the same as the double bass. The bass guitar is an instrument, as it is notated in bass clef an octave higher than it sounds to avoid excessive ledger lines. Like the electric guitar, the guitar has pickups and it is plugged into an amplifier and speaker on stage, or into a larger PA system using a DI unit. Since the 1960s, the guitar has largely replaced the double bass in popular music as the bass instrument in the rhythm section. While types of basslines vary widely from one style of music to another, many styles of music utilise the bass guitar, including rock, heavy metal, pop, punk rock, country, reggae, gospel, blues, symphonic rock, and jazz. It is often a solo instrument in jazz, jazz fusion, Latin, funk, progressive rock and other rock, the adoption of a guitar form made the instrument easier to hold and transport than any of the existing stringed bass instruments. The addition of frets enabled bassists to play in more easily than on acoustic or electric upright basses. Around 100 of these instruments were made during this period, around 1947, Tutmarcs son, Bud, began marketing a similar bass under the Serenader brand name, prominently advertised in the nationally distributed L. D. Heater Music Company wholesale jobber catalogue of 1948, however, the Tutmarc family inventions did not achieve market success. In the 1950s, Leo Fender, with the help of his employee George Fullerton and his Fender Precision Bass, which began production in October 1951, became a widely copied industry standard. This split pickup, introduced in 1957, appears to have been two mandolin pickups, the pole pieces and leads of the coils were reversed with respect to each other, producing a humbucking effect. Humbucking is a design that electrically cancels the effect of any AC hum, the Fender Bass was a revolutionary new instrument, which could be easily transported, and which was less prone to feedback when amplified than acoustic bass instruments. Monk Montgomery was the first bass player to tour with the Fender bass guitar, roy Johnson, and Shifty Henry with Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five, were other early Fender bass pioneers. Bill Black, playing with Elvis Presley, switched from bass to the Fender Precision Bass around 1957. The bass guitar was intended to appeal to guitarists as well as upright bass players, following Fenders lead, in 1953, Gibson released the first short scale violin-shaped electric bass with extendable end pin, allowing it to be played upright or horizontally. In 1959 these were followed by the more conventional-looking EB-0 Bass, the EB-0 was very similar to a Gibson SG in appearance
5.
Steel-string acoustic guitar
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The steel-string acoustic guitar is a modern form of guitar that descends from the classical guitar, but is strung with steel strings for a brighter, louder sound. It is often referred to simply as a guitar, though the nylon-strung classical guitar is also sometimes called an acoustic guitar. The most common type is called a flat top guitar, to distinguish it from the more specialized archtop guitar. The standard tuning for a guitar is E-A-D-G-B-E, although many players, particularly fingerpickers, use alternate tunings, such as open G, open D. There are many variations in construction and materials used in steel-string guitars, different combinations of woods and construction elements affect the timbre or tone of the guitar. Many players and luthiers are convinced that a well-made guitars tone improves over time, acoustic guitars are commonly constructed in several different body types. The proportion and overall size of two parts helps determine the overall tonal balance and native sound of a particular body style – the larger the body. The 00, also called the Double-Oh or the Grand Concert and it has the thinnest soundbox and the smallest overall size of the major styles, making it very comfortable to play but also one of the quietest. Its smaller size makes it suitable for younger or smaller-framed players and these guitars are commonly called parlor steels as they are well-suited to smaller rooms. Martins 00-xxx series and Taylors x12 series are common examples, the Grand Auditorium guitar, sometimes called the 000 or the Triple-Oh, is very similar in design to the Grand Concert, but slightly wider and deeper. Many 000-style guitars also have a back panel to increase the volume of space in the soundbox without making the soundbox deeper at the edges. Eric Claptons signature Martin guitar, for example, is of this style, Martins 000-xxx series and Taylors x14 series are well-known examples of the Grand Auditorium style. The Dreadnought style was designed by Martin Guitars to produce a deeper sound than classic-style guitars and this body styles combination of a small profile with a deep sound has made it immensely popular, and it has since been copied by virtually every major steel-string luthier. Martins D series guitars, such as the highly-prized D-28, are examples of the Dreadnought. This comes at the expense of being oversized, with a very deep sounding box, the foremost example of this style is the Gibson J-200, but like the Dreadnought, most guitar manufacturers have at least one jumbo model. Any of these body type can optionally incorporate a cutaway, a cutaway guitar has a redesigned upper bout that removes a section of the soundbox on the underside of the neck, hence the name cutaway. This allows for access to the frets that are located on top of the soundbox past the heel of the neck. The tradeoff is reduced soundbox volume, and often a change in bracing, the 12-string guitar replaces each single string with a course of two strings
6.
Guitar pick
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A guitar pick is a plectrum used for guitars. Picks are generally made of one uniform material—such as some kind of plastic, rubber, felt, tortoiseshell, wood, metal, glass, tagua and they are often shaped in an acute isosceles triangle with the two equal corners rounded and the third corner less rounded. They are used to strum chords or to individual notes on a guitar. In British English, guitar picks are referred to as plectrums reserving the term pick to identify the difference between this and finger picks, musicians have used plectrums to play stringed instruments for thousands of years. Feather quills were likely the first standardized plectra and became widely used until the late 19th century, other alternatives had come and gone, but tortoiseshell provided the best combination of tonal sound and physical flexibility for plucking a taut string. There have been innovations in the design of the guitar pick. Most of these were out of the issue of guitar picks slipping and flying out of the hand of the player. In 1896, a Cincinnati man affixed two rubber disks to either side of a pick, which made it the first popular solution to the problem. Over the next two decades more innovations were made, such as corrugating the rounded surface of the pick or drilling a hole through the center to fit the pad of a players thumb. A more notable improvement was attaching cork to the part of the pick. Some of these new designs made picks undesirably expensive, eventually, pickers realized that all they needed was something to sink their fingerprints into so the pick wouldnt slip, such as a high relief imprinted logo. Celluloid was a material on which this could easily be done, tony DAndrea was the one of the first people to use celluloid to produce and sell guitar picks. From the 1920s through the 1950s, DAndrea Manufacturing would dominate the worlds international pick market, providing to major businesses such as Gibson, Fender, and Martin. One of the main reasons celluloid was so popular as guitar pick material was that it very closely imitated the sound and flexibility of a tortoise shell guitar pick. Musicians had been partial to shell picks, and when DAndrea provided an alternative, DAndrea Manufacturing became very successful, Celluloid provided a good alternative in many ways. Tortoise shell was rare, expensive, and had a tendency to break, Celluloid was made from cellulose, one of the most abundant raw materials in the world, and nitrocellulose combined with camphor under heat and pressure produced celluloid. Later, other materials, such as nylon and less popularly wood, glass, or metal would become popular for making guitar picks for their increased grip, flexibility, or tonal qualities. Pick shapes started with guitarists shaping bone, shell, wood, cuttlebone, metal, amber, most of todays guitar pick shapes were created by the company that made the first plastic pick in 1922, DAndrea Picks
7.
Fingerstyle guitar
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Fingerstyle guitar is the technique of playing the guitar by plucking the strings directly with the fingertips, fingernails, or picks attached to fingers, as opposed to flatpicking. The term is used synonymously with fingerpicking, although fingerpicking can also refer to a specific tradition of folk, blues. Often, the guitarist will play the notes, interspersed with the melodys accompanying chords. Some fingerpicking guitarists also intersperse percussive tapping along with the melody, chords and this enables a single guitarist to provide all of these important song elements. This enables singer-guitarists to accompany themselves, and it enables smaller groups which have only a single guitarist to use one guitarist to provide all of these musical elements. Fingerpicking is a technique on the classical or nylon string guitar. Fingerpicking is less common on electric guitars, except in the metal music virtuoso style of lead guitar playing known as shred guitar. Because individual digits play notes on the rather than the hand working as a single unit. Deep bass notes, harmonic accompaniment, melody, and percussion can all be played simultaneously when playing Fingerstyle, players do not have to carry a plectrum, but fingernails may have to be maintained at the right length and in good condition. It is possible to play multiple non-adjacent strings at exactly the same time and this enables the guitarist to play a very low bass note and a high treble note at the same time. This enables the guitarist to play double stops, such as an octave, a fifth, (an exception to this may be found in the flamenco technique of rasgueado. It is easy to play arpeggios, but the techniques for tremolo and it is possible to play chords without any arpeggiation, because up to five strings can be plucked simultaneously. There is less need for fretting hand damping in playing chords, a greater variation in strokes is possible, allowing greater expressiveness in timbre and dynamics. A wide variety of strums and rasgueados are possible, less energy is generally imparted to strings than with plectrum playing, leading to lower volume when playing acoustically. Playing on heavier gauge strings can damage nails, fingerstyle is more suited to nylon strings or lighter gauge steel strings Nylon string guitars are most frequently played fingerstyle. The term Classical guitar music can refer to any kind of art music played on a nylon string guitar, or more narrowly to music of the classical period, as opposed to baroque or romantic music. The major feature of classical fingerstyle technique is that it enables solo rendition of harmony, the technique is intended to maximise the degree of control over the musical dynamics, texture, volume and timbral characteristics of the guitar. Careful attention is paid to the posture of the player
8.
Edgar Degas
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Edgar Degas was a French artist famous for his paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. He is especially identified with the subject of dance, more than half of his works depict dancers and he is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, although he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist. He was a draftsman, and particularly masterly in depicting movement, as can be seen in his rendition of dancers, racecourse subjects. His portraits are notable for their complexity and for their portrayal of human isolation. At the beginning of his career, Degas wanted to be a history painter, in his early thirties, he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life. Degas was born in Paris, France, into a wealthy family. He was the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans, Louisiana, and Augustin De Gas and his maternal grandfather Germain Musson, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti of French descent and had settled in New Orleans in 1810. Degas began his schooling at age eleven, enrolling in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and his mother died when he was thirteen, and his father and grandfather became the main influences on him for the remainder of his youth. Degas began to paint early in life, by the time he graduated from the Lycée with a baccalauréat in literature in 1853, at age 18, he had turned a room in his home into an artists studio. Upon graduating, he registered as a copyist in The Louvre Museum, Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853, but applied little effort to his studies. In April of that year Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts and he studied drawing there with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres. In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunts family in Naples and he also began work on several history paintings, Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60, Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860, and Young Spartans around 1860. In 1861 Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy and he exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention. The change in his art was influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris left him little time for painting. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective, after the war, Degas began in 1872 an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his brother René and a number of other relatives lived. Staying at the home of his Creole uncle, Michel Musson, on Esplanade Avenue, Degas produced a number of works, many depicting family members. One of Degass New Orleans works, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, garnered favorable attention back in France, Degas returned to Paris in 1873 and his father died the following year, whereupon Degas learned that his brother René had amassed enormous business debts
9.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is the fourth largest museum in the United States. It contains more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas, with more than one million visitors a year, it is the 55th most-visited art museum in the world as of 2014. Founded in 1870, the moved to its current location in 1909. The museum is affiliated with the Tufts School of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870 and opened in 1876, with most of its initial collection taken from the Boston Athenæum Art Gallery. Francis Davis Millet, a local artist, was instrumental in starting the Art School affiliated with the museum and it was built almost entirely of red brick and terracotta with a small amount of stone in its base. The brick was produced by the Peerless Brick Company of Philadelphia, in 1907, plans were laid to build a new home for the museum on Huntington Avenue in Bostons Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood near the renowned Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Museum trustees decided to hire architect Guy Lowell to create a design for a museum so that could be built in stages as funding was obtained for each phase, two years later, the first section of Lowell’s neoclassical design was completed. It featured a 500-foot façade of granite and a grand rotunda, the museum moved to its new location later that year, the Copley Square Hotel eventually would replace the old building. The second phase of construction built a wing along the The Fens to house paintings galleries and it was funded entirely by Maria Antoinette Evans Hunt, the wife of wealthy business magnate Robert Dawson Evans, and opened in 1915. From 1916 through 1925, the noted artist John Singer Sargent painted the frescoes that adorn the rotunda, numerous additions enlarged the building throughout the years, including the Decorative Arts wing in 1928 and the Norma Jean Calderwood Garden Court and Terrace in 1997. The West Wing, designed by I. M. Pei, opened in 1981 and this wing now houses the museums cafe, restaurant, and gift shop as well as a special exhibition space. In the mid-2000s, the museum launched an effort to renovate. In 2011, Moodys Investors Service calculated that the museum had over $180 million in outstanding debt, however, the agency cited growing attendance, a large endowment, and positive cash flow as reasons to believe that the museums finances would become stable in the near future. The renovation included a new Art of the Americas Wing to feature artwork from North, South, in 2006, the groundbreaking ceremonies took place. The landscape architecture firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol redesigned the Huntington Avenue and Fenway entrances, gardens, access roads, the wing opened on November 20,2010 with free admission to the public. Mayor Thomas Menino declared it Museum of Fine Arts Day, the 12, 000-square-foot glass-enclosed courtyard features a 42. 5-foot high glass sculpture, titled the Lime Green Icicle Tower, by Dale Chihuly. In 2014, the Art of the Americas Wing was recognized for its architectural achievement by being awarded the Harleston Parker Medal. In 2015, the museum renovated its Japanese garden, Tenshin-en, the garden, which originally opened in 1988, was designed by Japanese professor Kinsaku Nakane
10.
Rock music
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It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by blues, rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of genres such as electric blues and folk. Musically, rock has centered on the guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar. Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time signature using a verse-chorus form, like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. Punk was an influence into the 1980s on the subsequent development of subgenres, including new wave, post-punk. From the 1990s alternative rock began to rock music and break through into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the visually distinctive goth and emo subcultures and this trio of instruments has often been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments, particularly keyboards such as the piano, Hammond organ and synthesizers. The basic rock instrumentation was adapted from the blues band instrumentation. A group of musicians performing rock music is termed a rock band or rock group, Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple unsyncopated rhythms in a 4/4 meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four. Melodies are often derived from older musical modes, including the Dorian and Mixolydian, harmonies range from the common triad to parallel fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock, because of its complex history and tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources, including the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music and rhythm, as a result, it has been seen as articulating the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, rock and roll usually implies an identification of male sexuality, according to Simon Frith rock was something more than pop, something more than rock and roll. Rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the concept of art as artistic expression, original. The foundations of music are in rock and roll, which originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Its immediate origins lay in a melding of various musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience, debate surrounds which record should be considered the first rock and roll record. Other artists with rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis
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