pluck that!

on the menu tonight:
oud
lute
sanxian
classical
electric

YES it's random but i had to do it. it's ALL about the guitar.A bit of a history lesson on the greatest instrument ever.


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Sunday Night Jam Sessions



Al-Oud العود


According to Farabi, the oud was invented by Lamech, the sixth grandson of Adam. The legend tells that the grieving Lamech hung the body of his dead son from a tree. The first oud was inspired by the shape of his son's bleached skeleton.
The words "lute" and "oud" are both derived from Arabic العود (al-ʿūd, literally "the wood").[citation needed] Gianfranco Lotti suggests that the "wood" appellation originally carried derogatory connotations, because of proscriptions of all instrumental music in early Islam.[citation needed]

The prefix al- (meaning "the") in al-ʿūd was discarded by the Turks who then transformed the word ʿūd (consisting of the Arabic letters ʿayn-wāw-dāl) into ud because the sound represented by the Arabic letter ʿayn is not present in the Turkish language.

The oud was most likely introduced to Western Europe by the Arabs who established the Umayyad Caliphate of Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula beginning in the year 711 AD. Oud-like instruments such as the Ancient Greek Pandoura and the Roman Pandura likely made their way to the Iberian Peninsula much earlier than the oud. However, it was the royal houses of Al-Andalus that cultivated the environment which raised the level of oud playing to greater heights and boosted the popularity of the instrument. The most famous oud player of Al-Andalus was Zyriab. He established the first music conservatory in Spain, enhanced playing technique and added a fifth course to the instrument. The European version of this instrument came to be known as the lute - luth in French, laute in German, liuto in Italian, luit in Dutch, (all beginning with the letter "L") and alaud in Spanish. The word "luthier" meaning stringed instrument maker is also derived from the French luth. Unlike the oud the Europen lute utilized frets (usually tied gut).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oud

Lute

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 soundhole under the strings, called the rose. The soundhole 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.
Various types of necked chordophones were in use in ancient Egyptian (where they were introduced from Asia in the Middle Kingdom), Hittite, Greek, Roman, Bulgar, Turkic, Chinese, Armenian/Cilician cultures. The Lute developed its familiar forms in Arabia, Persia, Armenia, and Byzantium beginning in the early 7th century. These instruments often had bodies covered with animal skin, as do the modern American banjo, Persian tar, Indian sarod, West African xalam, or Chinese sanxian.

As early as the 6th century the Bulgars brought the short-necked variety of the instrument called Kobuz to the Balkans, and in the 9th century Moors brought Oud to Spain. The long-necked Pandora/Quitra had been common Mediterranean lute previously. The Quitra didn't become extinct however, but continued its evolution, its descendants being Chitarra Italiana, Chitarrone and Colascione, aside from the still surviving Kuitra of Algiers and Morocco.

In about the year 1500 many Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese lutenists adopted vihuela de mano, a viol-shaped instrument tuned like the lute, but both instruments continued in coexistence. This instrument also found its way to parts of Italy that were under Spanish domination (especially Sicily and the papal states under the Borgia pope Alexander VI who brought many Catalan musicians to Italy), where it was known as the viola da mano.

Another important point of transfer of the lute from Muslim to Christian European culture might have been in Sicily, where it was brought either by Byzantine or later by Saracen musicians. There were singer-lutenists at the court in Palermo following the Christian Norman conquest of the island, and the lute is depicted extensively in the ceiling paintings in the Palermo’s royal Cappella Palatina, dedicated by the Norman King Roger II in 1140. By the 14th century, lutes had disseminated throughout Italy. Probably due to the cultural influence of the Hohenstaufen kings and emperor, based in Palermo, the lute had also made significant inroads into the German-speaking lands by the 14th century.

Medieval lutes were 4- or 5-course instruments, plucked using a quill for a plectrum. There were several sizes, and by the end of the Renaissance, seven different sizes (up to the great octave bass) are documented. Song accompaniment was probably the lute's primary function in the Middle Ages, but very little music securely attributable to the lute survives from the era before 1500. Medieval and early-Renaissance song accompaniments were probably mostly improvised, hence the lack of written records.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lute

Sanxian

The sanxian (literally "three strings") is a Chinese lute — a three-stringed fretless plucked musical instrument. It has a long fingerboard, and the body is traditionally made from snakeskin stretched over a rounded rectangular resonator. It is made in several sizes for different purposes and in the late 20th century a four-stringed version was also developed. The Northern sanxian is generally larger, at about 122 centimetres in length, while Southern versions of the instrument are usually about 95 centimetres in length.
Traditionally the instrument is plucked with a thin, hard plectrum made from animal horn but today most players use a plastic plectrum (similar to a guitar pick) or, alternately, their fingernails. This use of fingers to pluck the instrument often shares technique with that of the pipa and is most commonly used in performance of sanxian arrangements of works traditionally written for the pipa. This allows for pipa techniques such as tremolo to be used. Other techniques for sanxian include the use of harmonics and hitting the skin of the instrument with the plectra or fingernail (comparable to the technique of tsugaru-jamisen).

A closely related musical instrument is the Japanese shamisen, which is derived from the sanxian but which generally uses cat or dog skin rather than snakeskin to cover its resonator. Even more closely related is the Okinawan sanshin, which is also covered in snakeskin. Additionally, the sanshin and sanxian share a structurally similar body part consisting of a round-edged square of wood. In the Japanese shamisen, the body (sao) is made of four pieces of wood instead of one. The Vietnamese đàn tam is also very similar to the sanxian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanxian

Classical Guitar

Before the development of the electric guitar and the use of synthetic materials, a guitar was defined as being an instrument having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides".[1] Instruments similar to the guitar have been popular for at least 5,000 years. The guitar appears to be derived from earlier instruments known in ancient India and Central Asia as the Sitara. The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument displaying all the essential features of a guitar being played is a 3300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.[2] The modern word, guitar, was adopted into English from Spanish guitarra, derived from the Latin word cithara, which in turn was derived from the earlier Greek word kithara, which perhaps derives from Persian sihtar[3]. Sihtar itself is related to the Indian instrument, the sitar.
Illustration from a Carolingian Psalter from the 9th century, showing a Guitar-like plucked instrument.
Illustration from a Carolingian Psalter from the 9th century, showing a Guitar-like plucked instrument.

The modern guitar is descended from the Roman cithara brought by the Romans to Hispania around 40 AD, and further adapted and developed with the arrival of the four-string oud, brought by the Moors after their invasion of the Iberian peninsula during the 8th century AD.[4] Elsewhere in Europe, the indigenous six-string Scandinavian lut (lute), had gained in popularity in areas of Viking incursions across the continent. Often depicted in carvings c.800 AD, the Norse hero Gunther (also known as Gunnar), played a lute with his toes as he lay dying in a snake-pit, in the legend of Siegfried.[5] By 1200 AD, the four string "guitar" had evolved into two types: the guitarra morisca (Moorish guitar) which had a rounded back, wide fingerboard and several soundholes, and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) which resembled the modern guitar with one soundhole and a narrower neck.[6]
The guitar player (c. 1672), by Johannes Vermeer
The guitar player (c. 1672), by Johannes Vermeer

The Spanish vihuela or "viola da mano", a guitar-like instrument of the 16th century, appears to be an aberration in the transition from the renaissance instrument to the modern guitar. It had lute-style tuning and a guitar-like body. Its construction had as much in common with the modern guitar as with its contemporary four-course renaissance guitar. The vihuela enjoyed only a short period of popularity; the last surviving publication of music for the instrument appeared in 1576. It is not clear whether it represented a transitional form or was simply a design that combined features of the Arabic oud and the European lute. In favor of the latter view, the reshaping of the vihuela into a guitar-like form can be seen as a strategy of differentiating the European lute visually from the Moorish oud.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar

Electric Guitar

An electric guitar is a type of guitar that uses pickups to convert the vibration of its steel-cored strings into electrical current, which is then amplified. The signal that comes from the guitar is often electrically altered to achieve various tonal effects prior to being fed into an amplifier, which produces the final sound which can be either an electrical sound or an acoustic sound. Devices commonly used by guitarists are meant to add distortion, wah, equalization, tremolo, and phase shift, amongst others, in some cases radically changing the sound that is emitted from the amplifier.

Despite its traditional association with rock music, the electric guitar has long been used in many popular styles of music, including almost all genres of rock and roll, country music, jazz, blues, ambient (or "new-age"), and even contemporary classical music. The instrument's distinctive sound and intimate connection with many legendary internationally-famous musicians has made it the signature instrument of late twentieth-century music. Specialized steel guitars are also in use, although they are to be considered a different instrument. This distinction has important consequences on claims of priority in the history of the electric guitar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_guitar


hope you love it like i do.
stay green.
-=v*