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Have you ever imagined how would life be without any musical instruments around? Quite miserable and empty, I guess. Communicating only with our body, our voices, our motions has some limitations, so we use these devices, the musical instruments, to help us communicate better, to amplify that communication or to expand and beautify it. Try it sometime, grab your guitar and with it express your dearest emotions to the one you love, just sing and play. I think it would get your message across much easier, don't you think? Of course, this site is about guitars. But you may be interested in other musical instruments, too. A guitar is a special kind of instrument, because it is relatively easy to learn, most people agree it's a beautiful way to accompany a voice. You can play a ballad with nothing more than a guitar and a voice, and it gives no sense that something's missing.
Guitar is a stringed instrument, which is any musical instrument that produces sound by the vibrations of strings. Strings may be of gut, vegetable fiber, nylon, or metal. Violin, harp, lute, mandolin are other stringed instruments.
Then there are the percussion instruments, where you strike them with something to produce sound. These are among the oldest known and are used mainly to form the rhythm, though the tunable ones can be used to form melody. Examples of these musical instruments are, the drums, timpani, snare drums, the bells, cymbals, castanets, and xylophones.
There are the wind instruments, where a column of air vibrates inside and generates sounds. Here you have the woodwind musical instruments like clarinet, oboe, flute, saxophone, and the brasswind, like trumpet, trombone, French horn and tuba.
Then there are the electronic musical instruments, generating music through electronic means. Such are the electric guitar (though at the same time a stringed instrument), the music synthesizer, and music computers.
Keyboard instruments produce sounds by pressing keys, push buttons, or parallel levers arranged in a row in front of the performer. The lower tones are placed on the left, the higher on the right. The piano, the organ, the harpsichord, the clavichord the electronic piano, the music synthesizer are examples of such. There are the hybrid types like the electric guitar (stringed and electric), and a special kind of musical instruments, the automatic, like the music box or the barrel piano. For more information on musical instruments and especially electric guitars, click here
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