All right in this segment we're going to look at
string instruments. We've already seen strings in the piano we've seen strings
in the harpsichord
but now we have strings on nice wooden bodies.
So lets start here with a guitar because that's an instrument most people are fairly
familiar with.
So we have strings just as we did on our piano or harpsichord
that are arrayed in some way. And they have tuning pegs. Remember
we saw them on the piano we saw them on the harpsichord but
on guitar they're much bigger and easier
to manage because the player has to fix it. You don't have a professional come
in
and tune your guitar for you. Before you play you have to do it yourself. We have
a body
this is fairly standard shape. It's been around for hundreds of years the guitar's
actually a pretty old instrument. It's been around a long time
and the comes in various sizes. Great big guitars
some smaller ones. This is called the tone hole
So when we were talking about the piano we talked about how the bottom of the piano was
wood so
it would vibrate and and amplify the sound. That's what the tone hole does
on string instruments. So we have the strings.
The sound goes vibrating down into this box
and if you were holding it you actually feel the whole box vibrates.
So this wood and all the air on the inside of it
is amplifying that sound so that it projects more.
Obviously there is a limit to how loudly you can play guitar which is why electric
instruments came around as soon as they could figured out how to do that so that you
could play
arenas and people could hear you play the guitar. And we now even amplify even
acoustic guitars like this so that you can get that same quality of sound
at a distance. So a guitar has six strings.
And you can see that it has this long neck which is pretty typical of
all the string instruments so we call this the body, this called the bridge
it's where the strings kind of come across
and then we have the neck. So the difference between a guitar and all the
other string instruments that we will look at
is that on the neck we have these bars that go
across it. These are called frets f-r-e-t-s the frets.
And so for guitarist you don't have to
feel where the notes go you have a placement.
Do if I wanna play D chord I know that I have to have
fingers on these two strings that these two frets and another one between those
two frets. And
I get a D chord.
So it's it's easier to learn because you have very specific places that your
fingers go
You can see them, they're marked. At the top
we have again the tuning pegs and the strings come onto there and
tighten down at the bottom. So that's the guitar
and it is a classical instrument. You won't hear it in the orchestra because you would
never hear it above all those other instruments playing
and having forty guitars on the stage is probably not a practical thing.
We do have guitar ensembles that play multiple parts.
So you can have and I've even heard a transcription of Beethoven's 5th Symphony
for guitar choir.
So you can do lots of things with guitars but you just can't expect them to
be as loud as other instruments so you won't see it in the orchestra.
So let's look at the orchestral strings now. All right these are
the two smallest members of the family. On this side I have a violin,
on this side I have a viola.
You can see that they're really not very different.
This is slightly larger. I think like 20 percent
bigger than a violin. So when you see them on stage
it's sort of hard to tell unless you put them really close together like this it's
hard to tell what's a violin what's a viola.
But you will know that there will be a lot more violins on the stage
and as we talk about ensembles you'll know that they usually sit
on that side they'll be over here and the violas are usually in the middle and
there aren't nearly as many of them.
So the violin is the soprano member of the string family.
It's going to be the highest sound. And then we would think of the viola as
the Alto.
As with all other things to do with physics and sound the bigger the
instrument
the deeper the sound. So this is going to sound higher
than a viola. But if you get up to the highest part the viola
it's going to sound a lot like the lower sound at the violin because they have
the same construction.
You see if they look alike, they're just different sizes.
String instruments also the only ones that come in sizes
built for different sizes of people. You can't buy
a children's version of a clarinet,
but you can get a violin at
I think it probably comes a small as 1/8 of the full size.
So that's why children can start string instruments so much earlier. They can
actually
get an instrument that is functions just like a full-size
but it's built for children. So you can see these little teeny tiny violins,
which is very fun to watch if you ever
get to go to something like a Suzuki string
performance you'll see them with that. But you can see that there are no frets
on these instruments. There is no marker that says hey your fingers go here.
Now this particular violin actually has
some tape on it so we've been using this to teach our music education majors how
to play the violin.
So string teachers will put little pieces of tape on there
while you're learning because there's no markings here to guide you.
They'll give it his all helpers and then as you learn you take the strings off
and you just go by the feel. The great thing about that for string player
is that you can really make minute adjustments in the pitch because you
could just slide your finger a little tiny bit
and the pitch will change. So you get little bit below the pitch you can
bring it back up, you can make certain pitches higher or lower based on were where
they're going which is something we like to do and all these string instruments can do
that really.
The piano, the notes are stuck you know you can't change the pitch of a piano
as you're playing you can do that with the violin. So
we see that. I'm gonna put one down because they're both
identical essentially. You can see that we have a chin rest year here
that's where it sits the viola and violin are both held exactly the same way.
And if you know somebody who plays the violin or viola a lot
they're going to have a little mark right here sort of the a
tell tale sign of a string player that they get a little mark right here just
from having this thing up underneath their neck all this time.
We see that has tuning pegs just like a guitar does. It also has these here, which
are
fine tuning pegs. So if you need to make some really tiny adjustments they will
do them down here.
You can see the bridge on this really looks like a bridge so if you think
about how a bridge comes up
from the roads on either side kinda goes up and then back down on the other side.
So we have
this section, which is called the bridge and then we have
the the neck here. So how do we actually make the sound. We have
two ways to do that. One is we could just pluck these strings.
And I didn't tune this, so if you are a violinist
don't be offended.
And you will hear violins do that in concerts when they are required to play
that way. They still do their fingers over here.
It's called pizzicato. So the music would tell them,
pizz, usually they just put pizz, pizzicato and that tells the violinist
put down your bow and pluck the strings. Everything else looks the same on the
page, it is just that the sound that you get is
is a very different kind of sound.
But most of the time string players play with the bow.
So we have here a violin bow and you can see that it is basically a rod of wood,
because we like vibration wood vibrates better. Has this section down here that you hold which is
called the frog.
I don't know why but that's what they call it. the frog.
And then the really important part which is the horse hair
that actually produces the sound. So you can see if I pulled us apart
that this is not a solid thing. This is actually a whole lot of horse hair.
Special horses probably they use
tail hair to make the bow.
So we have this bow. It does have to put
have to put rosin on it so it works properly but I think this one's rosined
pretty well so it should work.
So we get our violin and we just
(playing violin)
And you know I'm a brass player not a violin player but you get the general
principle.
So by drawing the string across the bow, the bow across the strings,
strings vibrate, and you can get a lot more sound obviously than
pizzicato. You can also get a sustain so
a violinist
has to do that for long tone. And you see that sometimes I'm getting two pitches
that's because you can actually touch two strings at once.
That's called a double stop when you have to play two strings at the same
time and composers will put that in for string players.
So you can actually create harmony for yourself as a string player.
So, this our violin, viola the two
smallest members of the family. Let's go to the bigger members now
I have here a cello.
So a cello is played
always sitting down because it's too big to
stick you know you don't put it underneath your neck or anything you can play violin
and viola strolling around strolling strings are always going to be violins and
violas.
You don't hear too many restaurant cello players is just not practical. So
here's our cello. You can see it's shaped just like a violin or viola
it's just bigger. The bridge is really high on this and look at how
how much that goes up. Same principles here.
(fingering strings)
And notice that these all have just four strings instead of six like our guitar did.
So it's played sitting like this I'll try to not embarrass myself here with
this
So you have to straddle it, basically, so
cellist play like this and then they would draw their bow
across this way. You can see that very nicely on these cause they are bigger.
That instead of a sound hole right underneath the strings like we had on
the guitar,
we have these things that we call F holes they are sort of shaped
like an F. And so instead of a round hole underneath
which we can't do because we've got this big bridge in that place anyway. We have
these F holes and that's where the sound comes out
of a cello, violin, or viola. So that's our
tenor member of the family. We had the violin a soprano
the viola is sort of our alto, and then we have our tenor.
And then we have the big boy.
Its heavy.
So this is a string bass.
Also called on upright bass, also called a double bass.
The way the name that is called often depends on what kind of
environment it's being performed in. So if you're playing jazz that use a call it
an upright bass.
Orchestral players usually refer to it as a string bass but
they're all the same instrument. So you see it looks just like the others
everything just got bigger. Gigantic bridge.
And now I can put my whole arm through the middle that. F holes are just
bigger.
Everything else is bigger. These also come in different shapes. The other ones are
pretty standard but they're also string basses that curve
here they have bigger shoulders they call them.
So makes this makes it easier for you get down here so if you have to move
your hands way down in them
to this, this kind of shape works really well if you got the big shoulders there
you have to work a little harder to get down to those
low notes. Can also see the scroll that's what we call this part, the scroll,
on it and all the instruments have one but this is just so big it's easy
to see.
Double bass is the only one that people hold the bow in different ways and this
is not a double bass bow but I'll just
sort of use it as a model. So this is sort of the standard bow hold, you hold it over hand.
(plays instrument)
You can see that it still works even though it's on this massive instrument.
So
some string bass players will hold it this way but there's an entire school,
and the bow is bigger, so it's easier, of string bass playing where they hold
it on the opposite
side they hold it underneath (plays).
One's called an English hold the others called a German hold and
so if you're an orchestra concert might look at the string bass
players to see if they're
which kind of bow hold are they using are they going over the bow in the
traditional
way that everybody else does or are they holding the bow
from the underside and pulling this way. So
all the strings have same basic sound because look at them
they look like a twins of mutant sizes.
So they have the same construction, the same basic sound.
It's just that this ones gonna be much deeper than it's
very high-pitched soprano sister we'll call
the violin the sister of this big baby the big bass brother.
So those are the basic orchestral strings. The other one that we would
have in orchestra would be a harp.
I don't have a harp to show you but I'll get you a video of one so they can see
how it works.
A harp as I think it's forty seven strings
that are equivalent to the white notes on our piano.
So the harpist has basically just white notes to choose from so to make
sharps and flats there are petals around the bottom so look at the video,
make sure you look at the feet.
There are seven pedals one for each letter of our musical alphabet.
So you'll see the harpist tap-dancing in some respects
moving those pedals up and down because that could change
the C string. You push the pedal down and that changes all the C's to C sharp
or to C flat depending on what you need. So harpist are always moving their feet
around to change those notes.
You also might wonder how they know which notes are which when there's no black
key white key had a relationship like there is on the piano.
If you look closely at it you can see that they're are some red strings and some
blue strings or black strings and then the rest are all sort of a silvery color
so that those two strings are the C and the F of
the keyboard. So that gives them a point in which they can
locate themselves and know that that's where C and F are
and then everything else they work from there. So basically that's how harp
works
It's all plucked, there's no bow on a harp and their favorite thing is doing a
glissando
where you go all up and down the strings and you get that lovely
angel sound that you hear in movies whenever the angels come.
So you'll be able to hear all that in the examples that I give you
from from the YouTube videos to watch for all these instruments so you can
hear
professionals play them instead of me. And that's our string instruments.