STRING INSTRUMENTS (BOWED INSTRUMENTS)

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A string instrument (or stringed instrument) is a musical instrument that produces sound by means of vibrating strings. In the Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification, used in organology, they are called chordophones. The most common string instruments in the string family are violin, cello, viola, double bass, mandolin, banjo, guitar, and harp.



Bowing: (Italian: Arco) is a method used in some string instruments, including the violin, viola, cello, and less commonly, the double bass etc. The bow consists of a stick with many hairs stretched between its ends. Bowing the instrument's string causes a stick-slip phenomenon to occur, which makes the string vibrate.



BERIMBAU:

The berimbau is a single-string percussion instrument, a musical bow, from Brazil. The berimbau's origins are not entirely clear, but there is not much doubt on its African origin.

The berimbau consists of a wooden bow (verga – traditionally made from biriba wood, which grows in Brazil), about 4 to 5 feet (1.5 m) long (1.2 to 1.5 m), with a steel string (arame – often pulled from the inside of an automobile tire) tightly strung and secured from one end of the verga to the other. A gourd (cabaça), dried, opened and hollowed-out, attached to the lower portion of the Verga by a loop of tough string, acts as a resonator.

The berimbau, as played for capoeira, basically has three sounds: the open string sound, the high sound, and the buzz sound.

CELLO:

A person who plays a cello is called a cellist. The cello is used as a solo instrument, in chamber music, and as a member of the string section of an orchestra. It is the second physically largest member of the violin family of musical instruments, next to the double bass.

The cello is most closely associated with European classical music, and has been described as the closest sounding instrument to the human voice.The instrument is a part of the standard orchestra and is the bass voice of the string quartet, as well as being part of many other chamber groups. A large number of concertos and sonatas have been written for the cello. The instrument is less common in popular music, but is sometimes featured in pop and rock recordings. The cello has also recently appeared in major hip-hop and R & B performances, such as singers Rihanna and Ne-Yo's performance at the American Music Awards.The instrument has also been modified for Indian classical music by Nancy Lesh and Saskia Rao-de Haas.

DILRUPA:

The dilrupa is a bowed musical instrument from India.

DOTAR:

The dutar also dotar or doutar is a traditional long-necked two-stringed lute found in Central Asia and South Asia. Its name comes from the Persian word for "two strings", dotar (do "two", tar "string"), although the Herati dutar of Afghanistan has 14 strings. When played, the strings are usually plucked by the Uyghurs of Western China and strummed and plucked by the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Afghan people. In West Bengal and Bangladesh, the instrument is played by the baul community, and is called dotara. Some versions of the dotara have four strings instead of two. In the instrument's 15th century beginnings in the hands of shepherds, its strings were made from gut. With the coming of the Silk Road, the strings were made from twisted silk. Modern instruments also have silk or nylon strings.
The dutar has a warm, dulcet tone. Typical sizes for the pear-shaped instrument range from one to two meters.




DOUBLE BASS:



The double bass, also known as contrabass or upright bass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument used in the modern symphony orchestra. It is a standard member of the string section of the symphony orchestra and smaller string ensembles in Western classical music. In addition, it is used in other genres such as jazz, 1950s-style blues and rock and roll, rockabilly/psychobilly, bluegrass, and tango.
Double basses are constructed from several types of wood, including maple for the back, spruce for the top, and ebony for the fingerboard. It is uncertain whether the instrument is a descendant of the viola da gamba or from the violin, but it is traditionally considered to be a member of the violin family. While the double bass is nearly identical in construction to the other violin family instruments, it also has features which may be derived from the viols.


EKTARA:




Ektara (Bengali: একতারা, Punjabi: ਇਕ ਤਾਰ; literally "one-string", also called iktar, ektar , yaktaro gopichand) is a one-string instrument used in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
In origin the ektara was a regular string instrument of wandering bards and minstrels from India and is plucked with one finger. The ektara usually has a stretched single string, an animal skin over a head (made of dried pumpkin/gourd, wood or coconut) and pole neck or split bamboo cane neck.




ERHU:



The erhu consists of a long vertical stick-like neck, at the top of which are two large tuning pegs, and at the bottom is a small resonator body (sound box) which is covered with python skin on the front (playing) end. Two strings are attached from the pegs to the base, and a small loop of string (qian jin) placed around the neck and strings acting as a nut pulls the strings towards the skin, holding a small wooden bridge in place.





HURDY GURDY:



The hurdy gurdy (also known as a wheel fiddle) is a stringed musical instrument in which the strings are sounded by means of a rosined wheel which the strings of the instrument pass over. This wheel, turned with a crank, functions much like a violin bow, making the instrument essentially a mechanical violin. Melodies are played on a keyboard that presses tangents (small wedges, usually made of wood) against one or more of these strings to change their pitch. Like most other acoustic string instruments, it has a soundboard to make the vibration of the strings audible.






RAVANHATHA:
Ravanahatha (Ravanastron) is a violin made of goat gut, coconut wood, coconut shell, and bamboo, with horsehair or a natural fibre serving as the string.
Ravanahatha is known as the first musical instrument with strings to be played with a bow and recognised as the world's first violin.[citation needed] According to the legend, Ravana was an ardent devotee of the Hindu god Shiva. Ravana served Shiva using the soulful music emanating from the ravanahatha.[citation needed]
After the 11th century, the ravanahatha underwent many changes and it took the shape of the modern violin in Italy in the 16th century.[citation needed]
The ravanahatha's birth itself is believed to have taken place under traumatic circumstances. According to legend, Ravana's mother Kaikasi, an ardent devotee of Shiva, was eager to go and live in the god's abode on Mount Kailash in the Himalayas. Ravana opposed the plan vehemently, but to please his mother he promised to bring Mount Kailash itself to Sri Lanka.

REBEC:


The rebec (sometimes rebeck, and originally various other spellings) is a bowed string musical instrument. In its most common form, it has narrowboat shaped body, three strings and is played on the arm or under the chin, like a violin.

The number of strings on the rebec varies from one to five, although three is the most common number. The strings are often tuned in fifths, although this tuning is by no means universal. The instrument was originally in the treble range, like the violin, but later larger versions were developed, such that by the 16th century composers were able to write pieces for consorts of rebecs, just as they did for consorts of viols.

SARANGI:

The Sarangi (Hindi: सारंगी) is a bowed, short-necked lute of the Indian subcontinent. It is an

Important bowed string instrument of India's Hindustani classical music tradition.

Carved from a single block of wood, the sarangi has a box-like shape, usually around two feet long and around half a foot wide. The lower resonance chamber is made from a hollowed-out block of tun (red cedar) wood and covered with parchment and a decorated strip of leather at the waist which supports the elephant-shaped bridge. The bridge in turn supports the huge pressure of approximately 40 strings.

SARINDA:






A sarinda is a stringed Indian folk musical instrument similar to lutes or fiddles. It is played with a bow and has three strings. The bottom part of the front of its hollow wooden soundbox is covered with animal skin. It is played while sitting on the ground in a vertical orientation.
The tribes of India, e.g. Tripuris, find use of sarinda in their traditional music and dance. It is the sole accompany for a solo or group folk singer(s).

VIOLIN:

The violin is a bowed string instrument with four strings usually tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest and highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which also includes the viola and cello.
The violin is sometimes informally called a fiddle, regardless of the type of music played on it. The word "violin" comes from the Middle Latin word vitula, meaning "stringed instrument";this word is also believed to be the source of the Germanic "fiddle".The violin, while it has ancient origins, acquired most of its modern characteristics in 16th-century Italy, with some further modifications occurring in the 18th century. Violinists and collectors particularly prize the instruments made by the Stradivari, Guarneri and Amati families from the 16th to the 18th century in Cremona.
A person who makes or repairs violins is called a luthier, or simply a violin maker. The parts of a violin are usually made from different types of wood (although electric violins may not be made of wood at all, since their sound may not be dependent on specific acoustic characteristics of the instrument's construction), and it is generally strung with gut or steel strings.
Someone who plays the violin is called a violinist or a fiddler. He or she produces sound from a violin by either drawing a bow (normally held in the right hand) across one or more strings (which may be stopped by the fingers of the other hand to produce a full range of pitches), plucking the strings (with either hand), or a variety of other techniques. The violin is played by musicians in a wide variety of musical genres, including Baroque music, classical, jazz, folk and traditional, and rock and roll.

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STRING INSTRUMENTS (PLUCKING)

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PLUCKING:

Plucking (Italian: pizzicato) is used as the sole method of playing, on instruments such as the banjo, guitar, harp, lute, mandolin, oud, sitar, and either by a finger or thumb, or by some type of plectrum. This category includes the keyboard instrument the harpsichord, which formerly used feather quills (now plastic plectra) to pluck the strings.

ACOUSTIC GUITAR:

An acoustic guitar is a guitar that uses only acoustic methods to project the sound produced by its strings. The term is a retronym, coined after the advent of electric guitars, which depend on electronic amplification to make their sound audible.

In all types of guitars the sound is produced by the vibration of the strings. However, because the strings can only displace a small amount of air, the volume of the sound needs to be increased in order to be heard. In an acoustic guitar, this is accomplished by using a soundboard and a resonant cavity, the sound box. The body of the guitar is hollow. The vibrating strings drive the soundboard through the bridge, making it vibrate. The soundboard has a larger surface area and thus displaces a larger volume of air, producing a much louder sound than the strings alone.

SEVEN STRING GUITAR:

A seven-string guitar is a guitar with seven strings instead of the usual six. Such guitars are not as common as the six-string variety, but a minority of guitarists have utilised them for at least 150 years. Some types of these instruments are specific to certain cultures (i.e. the Russian and Brazilian guitars).
There are eight-string and ten-string guitars in use as well, but these are even less common. Twelve-string guitars are more common, but these are usually instruments that have six two-string courses tuned to the usual six string arrangement.

STRING ARRANGEMENT OF 7 STRING GUITAR DGBDGBD.

BASS GUITAR:

The electric bass guitar (also called electric bass, or simply bass; pronounced /ˈbeɪs/, as in "base") is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb (either by plucking, slapping, popping, tapping, or thumping), or by using a plectrum.
The bass guitar is similar in appearance and construction to an electric guitar, but with a larger body, a longer neck and scale length, and usually four strings tuned to the same pitches as those of the double bass, which correspond to pitches one octave lower than those of the four lower strings of a guitar (E, A, D, and G). The bass guitar is a transposing instrument, as it is notated in bass clef an octave higher than it sounds (as is the double bass) in order to avoid the excessive use of ledger lines. Like the electric guitar, the electric bass guitar is plugged into an amplifier and speaker for live performances.
Since the 1950s, the electric bass guitar has largely replaced the double bass in popular music as the bass instrument in the rhythm section. While the types of basslines performed by the bass guitarist vary widely from one style of music to another, the bass guitarist fulfills a similar role in most types of music: anchoring the harmonic framework and laying down the beat. The bass guitar is used in many styles of music including rock, metal, pop, country, blues and jazz. It is used as a soloing instrument in jazz, fusion, Latin, funk, and in some rock and metal (mostly progressive rock and progressive metal) styles.

ELECTRIC GUITAR:

An electric guitar is a guitar that uses pickups to convert the vibration of its steel-cored strings (sometimes nickel) into an electrical current, which is made louder with an instrument amplifier and a speaker. The signal that comes from the guitar is sometimes electronically altered with guitar effects such as reverb or distortion. While most electric guitars have six strings, seven-string instruments are used by some jazz guitarists and metal guitarists (especially in nu metal), and 12-string electric guitars (with six pairs of strings, four of which are tuned in octaves) are used in genres such as jangle pop and rock.
The electric guitar was first used by jazz guitarists, who used amplified hollow-bodied instruments to get a louder sound in Swing-era big bands. The earliest electric guitars were hollow bodied acoustic instruments with tungsten steel pickups made by the Rickenbacker company in 1931. While one of the first solid-body guitars was invented by Les Paul, the first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar was the Fender Esquire (1950). The electric guitar was a key instrument in the development of many musical styles that emerged since the late 1940s, such as Chicago blues, early rock and roll and rockabilly, and 1960s blues rock. It is also used in a range of other genres, including country music, Ambient (or New Age), and in some contemporary classical music.

HARP:

Harp is a stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicular to the soundboard. As many other non-percussion instruments, it can also be used as a percussion instrument. All harps have a neck, resonator and strings. Some, known as frame harps, also have a forepillar; those lacking the forepillar are referred to as open harps. Depending on its size (which varies considerably), a harp may be played while held in the lap or while stood on the floor. Harp strings can be made of nylon (sometimes wound around copper), gut (more commonly used than nylon), wire, or silk. A person who plays the harp is called a harpist or a harper. Folk and Celtic musicians often use the term "harper," whereas classical/pedal musicians use "harpist."
Various types of harps are found in Africa, Europe, North, and South America, and a few parts of Asia. In antiquity harps and the closely related lyres were very prominent in nearly all musical cultures, but they lost popularity in the early 19th century with Western music composers, being thought of primarily as a woman's instrument after Marie Antoinette popularised it as an activity for women.
The aeolian harp (wind harp), the autoharp, and all forms of the lyre and Kithara are not harps because their strings are not perpendicular to the soundboard; they are part of the zither family of instruments along with the piano and harpsichord. In blues music, the Harmonica is called a "Blues harp" or "harp", but it is a free reed wind instrument, not a stringed instrument.

HARP GUITAR:

The harp guitar (or "harp-guitar") is a stringed instrument with a history of well over two centuries. While there are several unrelated historical stringed instruments that have appropriated the name “harp-guitar” over the centuries, the term today is understood as the accepted vernacular to refer to a particular family of instruments defined as "A guitar, in any of its accepted forms, with any number of additional unstopped strings that can accommodate individual plucking."Additionally, in reference to these instruments, the word "harp" is now a specific reference to the unstopped open strings, and is not specifically a reference to the tone, pitch range, volume, silhouette similarity, construction, floor-standing ability, nor any other alleged "harp-like" properties. To qualify in this category, an instrument must have at least one unfretted string lying off the main fretboard. Further, the unfretted strings can be, and typically are, played as an open string.
This family consists of a virtually limitless variety of different instrument configurations. Most readily identified are American harp guitars with either hollow arms, double necks or harp-like frames for supporting extra bass strings, and European bass guitars (or kontragitarres). Other harp guitars feature treble or mid-range floating strings, or various combinations of multiple floating string banks along with a standard guitar neck.

BANJO:

The banjo is a stringed instrument developed by enslaved Africans in the United States, adapted from several African instruments. The name banjo is commonly thought to be derived from the Kimbundu term mbanza. Some etymologists derive it from a dialectal pronunciation of "bandore", though recent research suggests that it may come from a Senegambian term for a bamboo stick formerly used for the instrument's neck.

LUTES:

Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck (either fretted or unfretted) and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes.

Lutes are made almost entirely of wood. The soundboard is a teardrop-shaped thin flat plate of resonant wood (usually spruce). In all lutes the soundboard has a single (sometimes triple) decorated sound hole under the strings, called the rose. The sound hole is not open, but rather covered with a grille in the form of an intertwining vine or a decorative knot, carved directly out of the wood of the soundboard.

MANDOLIN:

A mandolin is a musical instrument in the lute family (plucked, or strummed). It is descended from the mandore, a soprano member of the lute family. It has a body with a teardrop-shaped soundboard, or one which is essentially oval in shape, with a soundhole, or soundholes, of varying shapes which are open and are not decorated with an intricately carved grille like the Baroque era mandolins.
Originally mandolins had six double courses of gut strings tuned similarly to lutes, and plucked with the fingertips, while the design common today has eight metal strings in four pairs (courses) which are plucked with a plectrum. The latter originated in Naples, Italy during the 3rd quarter of the 18th century.
There were and still are many variants. These include Milanese, Lombard, Brescian and other 6-course types, as well as four-string (one string per course), twelve-string (three strings per course), and sixteen-string (four strings per course).

RABAB:

Three types of Sikh musician - rababis, ragis, and dhadhis - flourished during the period of the gurus. Guru Nanak started the rababi tradition by engaging Bhai Mardana as his accompanist. The Muslim singers formerly called mirasis, Nanak called "rababis", because they played on the rabab (rebec). Some notable rababis after Mardana were his son Shahjada, Balwand and Satta, Babak, son of Satta, Chatra, son of Babak, and Saddu and Baddu. Rababis used to perform kirtan regularly at Amritsar before the partition in 1947, after which the rababis migrated to Pakistan.
The last of the line of rababis was Bhai Chand. During the 20th century CE the instrument's use in Sikh kirtan was eclipsed by the harmonium but it has been revived.
Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabab.

SAROD:

The sarod is a stringed musical instrument, used mainly in Indian classical music. Along with the sitar, it is the most popular and prominent instrument in Hindustani (north Indian) classical music. The sarod is known for a deep, weighty, introspective sound (contrast with the sweet, extremely rich texture of the sitar) with sympathetic strings that give it a resonant, reverberant quality. It is a fretless instrument able to produce the continuous slides between notes known as meend (glissandi), which are very important to Indian music.

SITAR:

The sitar (Hindi: सितार, Urdu: ستار, Persian: سی تار ) is a plucked stringed instrument predominantly used in Hindustani classical, where it has been ubiquitous in Hindustani classical music since the Middle Ages. It derives its resonance from sympathetic strings, a long hollow neck and a gourd resonating chamber. Used throughout the Indian subcontinent, particularly in Northern India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the sitar became known in the western world through the work of Pandit Ravi Shankar beginning in the late 1950s, particularly after Beatle George Harrison took lessons from Shankar and played sitar in songs including Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown). The Rolling Stones used sitar in Paint It, Black and it was also used by others such as thrash metal band Metallica on the introduction of Wherever I May Roam. One of the early pioneers of fusion Sitar music was Ashwin Batish whose CD Sitar Power (1985) took the top ten spot in many NPR and World music radio stations all across the US, Canada and abroad.

SURBAHAR:

Surbahar (Urdu: سربہار; Hindi: सुर बहार), sometimes known as bass sitar, is a plucked string used in the Hindustani classical music of North India. It is closely related to sitar, but it has a lower tone. Depending on the instrument's size, it is usually pitched two to five whole steps below the standard sitar, but Indian classical music having no concept of absolute pitch, this may vary. The instrument can emit frequencies lower than 20 Hz.
Surbahar is over 130 cm (51 inches) long. It uses a dried pumpkin as a resonator, and has a neck with very long frets, which allow a glissando of six notes on the same fret through the method of pulling. The neck is made out of tun (Cedrela tuna), or teak wood. It has four rhythm strings (cikari), four playing strings (the thickest beings 1 mm in diameter), and 15 to 17 unplayed sympathetic strings. All strings lie on a flat bridge which amplifies the sound and the spectrum when a vibrating string hits the bridge's flat part. The instrumentalist plays the strings using a metallic plectrum, the mizrab, which is fixed on the index finger of her/his right hand. Three plectrums are used to play the dhrupad style of alap, jor, and jhala on surbahar. In the dhrupad style, instead of performing the sitarkhani and masitkhani gats, the instrumentalist plays the slow dhrupad composition in accompaniment with pakhawaj.

TAMBURA:

The tambura (Devanagari: तम्पूरा) is a long necked plucked lute, a stringed instrument found in different versions in different places. The tambura (South India), tamburo (Gujarati), or tanpura (North India) in its bodily shape somewhat resembles the sitar, but it has no frets, as only the open strings are played as a harmonic accompaniment to the other musicians. It has four or five (rarely, six) wire strings, which are plucked one after another in a regular pattern to create a harmonic resonance on the basic note (bourdon or drone function).
Tanpuras come in different sizes and pitches: bigger "males" and smaller "females" for vocalists and yet a smaller version that is used for accompanying sitar or sarod, called tamburi or tanpuri. Male vocalists pitch their tonic note (Sa) to about C#, female singers usually a fifth higher. The male instrument has an open string length of approx. one metre, the female is sized down to 3/4.

VEENA:

Veena (also spelled 'vina', Tamil: வீணை, Sanskrit: वीणा (vīṇā), KannadaವೀಣೆMalayalam: വീണ, Telugu: వీణ) is a plucked stringed instrument used mostly in Carnatic music. There are several variations of the veena, which in its South Indian form is a member of the lute family. One who plays the veena is referred to as a vainika.

About four feet in length, its design consists of a large resonator (kudam) carved and hollowed out of a log (usually of jackwood), a tapering hollow neck (dandi) topped with 24 brass or bell-metal frets set in scalloped black wax on wooden tracks, and a tuning box culminating in a downward curve and an ornamental dragon's head (yali). A small table-like wooden bridge (kudurai)—about 2 x 2½ x 2 inches—is topped by a convex brass plate glued in place with resin. Two rosettes, formerly of ivory, now of plastic or horn, are on the top board (palakai) of the resonator. Four main playing strings tuned to the tonic and the fifth in two octaves (for example, B flat-E flat below bass clef - B flat- E flat in bass clef) stretch from fine tuning connectors attached to the end of the resonator. across the bridge and above the fretboard to four large-headed pegs in the tuning box. Three subsidiary drone strings tuned to the tonic, fifth, and upper tonic (E flat - B flat- E flat in the tuning given above) cross a curving side bridge leaning against the main bridge, and stretch on the player's side of the neck to three pegs matching those of the main playing strings. All seven strings today are of steel, with the lower strings often wound like those of the lower strings of a guitar.

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