A guitar is a very popular, if not the most popular musical instrument all over the world. It has got style, soul and a wonderful visual as well as a soulful effect on the player as well as the audience. It can create different moods and is a perfect fit for all types of music. In fact, it will not be an iota of exaggeration when it is aid that without a guitar no genre of music will be the same.
All musicians around the world use one or a couple of guitars for almost every kind of music. Whether it is court music or western, op or rock music, you will find at least one guitar player playing it by the side of the lead vocalist. Few even signs with a guitar.
If you are aware of Flamenco, traditional Spanish folk music, you cannot imagine it with a guitar. As for the American blues, you will miss the sad cry of the guitar which is the signature style of this music genre. On the other hand, it will hardly be rock and roll music without this wonderful instrument.
The debatable history
To know about the guitar in-depth, it better to know a bit about its history. No one is dead sure about when the guitar was first played, but in most cases, music experts agree that it is ancient. It is found through research that an instrument very much similar to guitar was found and played in Egypt more than thousand years ago. However, there are a few other experts that debate on this and say that the ancestors of the modern guitar brought it from ancient Persia to Spain sometime in the twelfth century.
It is here in Spain that the guitar continued to develop to become the modern Trusty Guitar. Later in the seventeenth century, the modern guitar got its modern shape and feature.
The rise in popularity
Many famous musicians played the guitar and made it popular through their works, style, and creation.
- Renowned Italian violinist Niccolo Paganini wrote music for the guitar and played it in the early eighteenth century.
- Franz Schubert also used the guitar to create some of his famous works.
- However, modern Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia made this instrument extremely popular.
However, the strongest link to a Spanish guitar happens to be the one developed in Southern Spain and is called Andalusia. In the nineteen thirties, another person by the name Les Paul started experimenting to design an electric guitar. It is he who invented an electric guitar with a solid body in nineteen forty-six, and it came in the market through The Gibson Guitar Company in nineteen fifty-two. This was when its powerful presence influenced popular music.
The significance of the guitar
Whether it is a solid body Spanish Trusty Guitar or Hawaiian, it has almost the same six strings and shape. However, a Spanish guitar sounds very different from a traditional guitar. Use of guitar has always held a prominent place in blues music, and the invention of an electric guitar by Les Paul helped the modern blues music as much as possible.
- There are many great blues guitarists, but all are measured with the caliber of famous guitarist B.B. King and his large, black and beautiful guitar Lucille that is seen at the Rock and Soul Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
- Another renowned guitarist of American is Willie Nelson, the well-known country music star. His guitar, Trigger, is as famous as Lucille.
- Amongst the rock and roll performers, Chuck Berry was very good with a guitar. His method of playing was very fast and was extremely popular and is still followed by many in the rock music scene.
Ideally, kinds of guitar music are as different as there are guitar players and all cannot play these styles in one program or mix different types. However, Jose Feliciano could do it with his traditional Spanish guitar. He could mix a little bit of jazz, blues, and Latin sound.
Pairing guitar effects
If you want to play the guitar at its best, then you must match it well with your musical style. As there are different genres of music, this seems to be fairly obvious but is not easy. It all depends on the pedal that you use. If you use a death metal distortion pedal for playing country music, you will never have that effect. Though there are no hard and fast rules, you may try it and find how it looks though.
However, you will need to break down different genres of music so that you can blend the guitar effects perfectly.
- Rock music happens to be the most difficult music genre because it uses almost every effect. You will find distortion and overdrive to be most prominent and notable among all effects, but there is a huge range waiting to be used here. You can try out light overdrive, heavy metal, delay, chorus, reverb, phaser, flanger, compression and more to create unusual and unique effects like octave and envelop filters.
- Blues are comparatively easy genre because things are kept pretty simple by the blues players. The most common effect used in blues music is the overdrive.
- Jazz music is very different from blues and rock music. Jazz guitar players usually prefer a smoother and cleaner sound. There are a few jazz players who favor amps which stay clean even at high volumes. Ideally, the most common effect pedals in jazz music are to have no real effect at all as the compressor gives a filter effect influencing the even tone produced by squashing the lows and highs to prevent these from flowing very smoothly.
- Country music players like jazz favor a clean tone. It is not in the modern country music but even in the times when Johnny Cash ruled supreme. The electric guitar cuts right through the songs with its clean punch accomplished by using a compressor.
Metal music is known to burst your eardrums with hundred watts of simply pure harmonic distortion modern pedals can fill the auditory void and still gain high distortion with no complaint from your neighbors.