Most Popular Types Of String Instruments
- Guitar. A guitar is a stringed instrument from the Lute family shaped like a figure eight. ...
- Violin. Another eight-shaped instrument, violins share similar characteristics to but are much smaller than acoustic guitars.
- Ukulele. ...
- Cello. ...
- Viola. ...
- Double Bass. ...
- Banjo. ...
- Mandolin. ...
- Harp. ...
What musical instruments are uniquely American?
- Transverse ocarina
- Pendant ocarina
- Inline ocarina
- Multi chambered ocarina
- Keyed ocarina
- Slide ocarina
Which musical instrument is simpler to learn, flute or guitar?
- What kind of flute you are talking about? That is a keyed “western” flute, or one of the various folk flutes.
- Does the flute you have actually function well? ...
- Are you trying this on your own, or do you have a teacher (even in a group setting). ...
- What do you mean by decent?
What is the smallest instrument in the flute family?
The violin is the smallest and highest pitched instrument in the string family. The viola is a little larger and deeper in sound. The cello is much larger than the viola and produces a rich, mellow tone. The Double Bass is the largest member of the string family and has a very deep tone. Woodwind Family
What are the four musical instrument families?
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- Has four strings
- Shaped like an hourglass
- Made out of wood (usually spruce, maple, and ebony)
- Played with a bow
- Is the smallest of the string instruments
What instruments are in the lute?
lute, in music, any plucked or bowed chordophone whose strings are parallel to its belly, or soundboard, and run along a distinct neck or pole. In this sense, instruments such as the Indian sitar are classified as lutes.
How many types of lute are there?
Lutes came in all different sizes: soprano, alto, tenor, bass, great bass, and even little sopranino instruments. They could be played together in groups called consorts and you would create a wider spectrum of sound and a wider range of pitches.
Is the ukulele in the lute family?
The ukulele (/ˌjuːkəˈleɪli/ YOO-kə-LAY-lee; from Hawaiian: ʻukulele [ˈʔukuˈlɛlɛ], approximately OO-koo-LEH-leh), also called Uke, is a member of the lute family of instruments of Portuguese origin and popularized in Hawaii. It generally employs four nylon strings.
Is a violin a lute?
What Are These Instruments? The Lute can refer to any stringed instrument with having the strings running in plain parallel lines to the sound table. The Violin also known as the fiddle is a string instrument usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths.
Is a guitar a lute?
The most obvious difference between the lute and the guitar is the pear-shaped body of the lute, which is produced by gluing ribs of wood together and then gluing the soundboard on top.
What is the most common lute?
Lutes were and are made in different keys; the most common renaissance lute today is an instrument tuned in G, at modern pitch (A=440Hz) with a string length of around 60cm.
Is the mandolin similar to violin?
Both instruments have the same tessitura: G, D, A, E. But they have a different number of strings. The violin uses 4 strings, and the mandolin has actually 8 strings. They are arranged and paired up, and then each pair is tuned to the same note.
Is a mandolin and ukulele the same?
A mandolin has 8 strings, where a ukulele only has four. Additionally, a mandolin's strings are metal where a uke would normally be nylon. This makes for a huge difference in string tension. The mandolin's strings are physically harder to push and there are twice as many of them!
What is the difference between a lute and a mandolin?
A mandolin is tuned using a machine head, like a guitar, and the instrument is tuned to the violin pitch G-D-A-E. A lute is tuned in 4ths, with a central 3rd similar to the modern guitar. The tuning varies depending on the style of the lute, but a 6-course Renaissance lute will typically be tuned to G-C-F-a-d'-go.
What is the difference between a lute and a lyre?
Lyre has a bowl-shaped resonator underneath the strings and body to project sound forward into an audience while the lute is flat-backed and designed to be played in a large hall or outdoors. The lyre is also not as popular as the lute, which has been used by such great composers as Bach and Beethoven.
Is flute a Aerophone?
Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening. According to the instrument classification of Hornbostel–Sachs, flutes are categorized as edge-blown aerophones.
What are medieval instruments?
Instruments, such as the vielle, harp, psaltery, flute, shawm, bagpipe, and drums were all used during the Middle Ages to accompany dances and singing. Trumpets and horns were used by nobility, and organs, both portative (movable) and positive (stationary), appeared in the larger churches.
What is a lute family?
The lute family includes not only short-necked plucked lutes such as the lute, oud, pipa, guitar, citole, gittern, mandore, rubab, and gambus and long-necked plucked lutes such as banjo, tanbura, bağlama, bouzouki, veena, theorbo, archlute, pandura, sitar, Tanbur, setar, but also bowed instruments such as the Yaylı. Click to see full answer.
How does the lute work?
The lute is plucked or strummed with one hand while the other hand "frets" (presses down) the strings on the neck's fingerboard. By pressing the strings on different places of the fingerboard, the player can shorten or lengthen the part of the string that is vibrating, thus producing higher or lower pitches (notes).
What instrument is used to pluck the strings?
Plucking is a method of playing on instruments such as the veena, banjo, ukulele, guitar, harp, lute, mandolin, oud, and sitar, using either a finger, thumb, or quills ( now plastic plectra) to pluck the strings.
Is a lute a musical instrument?
Hereof, is Lute a musical instrument? In Europe, lute refers to a plucked stringed musical instrument popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. The earliest European lutes followed the Arab instruments in having four strings plucked with a quill plectrum.
What is the lute instrument?
The lute player either improvises ("realizes") a chordal accompaniment based on the figured bass part, or plays a written-out accompaniment (both music notation and tablature ("tab") are used for lute). As a small instrument, the lute produces a relatively quiet sound.
Who were the pioneers of the lute?
Important pioneers in lute revival were Julian Bream, Hans Neemann, Walter Gerwig, Suzanne Bloch and Diana Poulton. Lute performances are now not uncommon; there are many professional lutenists, especially in Europe where the most employment is found, and new compositions for the instrument are being produced by composers.
What is the sound of a lute?
As a small instrument, the lute produces a relatively quiet sound . The player of a lute is called a lutenist, lutanist or lutist, and a maker of lutes (or any similar string instrument, or violin family instruments) is referred to as a luthier .
How many strings are in a lute?
They produce a bass that differs somewhat in timbre from nylon basses. The lute's strings are arranged in courses, of two strings each, though the highest-pitched course usually consists of only a single string, called the chanterelle. In later Baroque lutes two upper courses are single.
How many different lute sizes were there?
There were several sizes, and by the end of the Renaissance, seven different sizes (up to the great octave bass) are documented. Song accompaniment was probably the lute's primary function in the Middle Ages, but very little music securely attributable to the lute survives from the era before 1500.
What instruments were used in the Renaissance?
The lute is used in a great variety of instrumental music from the Medieval to the late Baroque eras and was the most important instrument for secular music in the Renaissance. During the Baroque music era, the lute was used as one of the instruments which played the basso continuo accompaniment parts.
How does the lute work?
The lute is plucked or strummed with one hand while the other hand "frets" (presses down) the strings on the neck's fingerboard. By pressing the strings on different places of the fingerboard, the player can shorten or lengthen the part of the string that is vibrating, thus producing higher or lower pitches (notes).
What is the lute family?
The lute was pre-eminent in a family of plucked-string instruments which included the mandoline-like citole and the gittern (q.v.), as well as the long-necked Saracen or Moorish guitar.
What is the difference between a Renaissance lute and a medieval lute?
The main difference from the Renaissance lute, however, is that the medieval variety was played using a quill plectrum on a single line of music. Typically, the right arm of the player comes directly around the end of the instrument (or even up from the bottom), allowing for an easy up-and-down motion of the plectrum. Plectrum lute.
Overview
Lutes are stringed musical instruments that include a body and "a neck which serves both as a handle and as a means of stretching the strings beyond the body".
The lute family includes not only short-necked plucked lutes such as the lute, oud, pipa, guitar, citole, gittern, mandore, rubab, and gambus and long-necked plucke…
Precursors to lutes: A theory
In theory, families of musical instruments descend from the musical bow.
Henri Breuil surveyed the Trois Frères caves in France and made an engraving that attempted to reproduce a c. 13,000 BC cave painting into a black-and-white lithograph engraving. His engraving showed a mysterious figure, a "man camouflaged to resemble a bison", in the midst of a mass of herd-animals, "her…
Long-necked lutes
The most ancient lutes had long necks. These survived into the modern era as the tanbur, which Sacks said "faithfully preserved the outer appearance of the ancient lutes of Babylonia and Egypt". Sachs, one of those who created the widespread system of musical instrument classification idea today, categorized long lutes with a "pierced lute" and "long neck lute". The pierced lute had a nec…
Mathematics and music
The lute is tied to the mathematics related to pitches. Unlike the harp, in which a string produces a single note, a lute string produces more than one note. Placing a finger on a string divides the string into measurable parts. Measuring those parts leads to mathematical ratios, useful in placing frets on the neck of the lute. An instrument such as the setar uses moveable frets to hit whole not…
Short-necked lutes
Although the oldest iconographic evidence concerning lutes deals with long lutes in Mesopotamia and Egypt, some long-necked lutes are shorter than others. Comparatively, the Greek and Byzantine pandura is shorter than the tanbur, even though both are long lutes. Shorter lutes exist among the long-necked lutes today, including the tanburica, cura and komuz.