Interested in starting a hobby? Or are you interested in learning how to play a musical instrument? Why not start your search with stringed instruments? They can be played in many ways, and come in many variations. Here we enumerate some of them.
Stringed instruments are musical instruments that produces sound by the vibration of stretched strings. The pitch is modified by the thickness, tension, and length of the string which can be made of vegetable fibre, metal, animal gut, silk, or artificial materials such as plastic or nylon.
To produce sound and beautiful music, the string may be struck, plucked, rubbed (bowed), or, occasionally, blown (by the wind). In each case the effect is to displace the string from its normal position of rest and to cause it to vibrate in complex patterns.
String instruments range from the simple lyre, to the modern guitar, violin, and piano. Here is a very basic list of the stringed instruments:
- Violin
- Cello
- Viola
- Double bass
- Guitar
- Mandolin
- Banjo
- Harp
- Lute
- Zither
The violin family is probably one of the most popular group of stringed instruments. The playing ranges of the instruments in this group of instruments overlap each other, but the tone quality and physical size of each distinguishes them from one another.
Guitars are also very popular as it is used in a wide variety of musical genres worldwide. There are three main types of modern acoustic guitar: the classical guitar (nylon-string guitar), the steel-string acoustic guitar, and the archtop guitar.
The piano is actually a hybrid – a combination of both strings and percussion. It’s a string instrument because the musical tones originate in the strings; and it’s also a percussion instrument, because the strings are set into vibration by being struck with hammers. To be historically correct, it’s classified as a “keyed zither” by musicologists.
So, have you had any though on which instrument to choose? Not decided yet? Well, stick around to find out more about wind instruments!
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