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Jazz
Jazz is a musical movement which dominated the 1900s. It is mainly an American form and remains popular to this day. Jazz can be defined as anything from popular music of the twentieth century to the improvised sounds of a dance band. Some prominent forms of Jazz throughout the century have been Ragtime, Blues ,…
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Expressionism
Although not as important as Impressionism, Expressionism was a prominent early twentieth century movement. Stylistically, expressionistic music was very atonal and dissonant. It was a German movement away from French Impressionism. It was emotional and had a somewhat Romantic feel to it.
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Action
Action is the strings’ playablility along the neck. Action is affected by the strings’ distance from the neck, the neck straightness, and string gauge.
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Tempo
The tempo is how fast or slow the song is. It is measured by beats per minute (bpm). 60 bpm is a slow tempo. 130 bpm is moderately fast. 160 bpm is fast.
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Rhythm
Rhythm is the duration of time that the note is sounded or a variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events. Standard music notation contains rhythmic information and is adapted specifically for drums and percussion instruments. The drums are generally used to keep other instruments in ‘time’. They do…
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Tonic
The tonic is the first scale degree of a diatonic scale (for example, the major scale, is a diatonic scale). Sometimes it’s called the 1st scale step, or the 1st. The tonic is often confused with the root, which is the reference note of a chord, rather than that of the scale. It is often…
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Compressor
So what exactly is a compressor? A compressor is a signal processor that is used to reduce the dynamic range between the softest and loudest parts of the audio signal. Think of the sound of your guitar as a wave. There is a peak where it is at its highest level and a trough where it…
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Phase Shifter
Phase shifters are like flangers except they have multiple flanges going on at the same time and sometimes with no predetermined speed. Both are great additions to any guitar player’s set-up.
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Flange
Flange was created by accident in a studio. It was found that if you played back a reel-to-reel tape of the guitar track and held up the reel with your hand and let it go it would catch up with the other tracks causing what would become known as flanging. The best way I can describe this effect…
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Chorus
Chorus can be either one of two things. Part of a song form: A chorus can be a part of song that has a line or lines that are repeated. Also called the refrain. A guitar effect: Chorus is a version of delay and is a favorite effect for clean sounds. Chorus gives the impression of multiple instruments…