Музика і вокал: науковий підхід
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How does an electric guitar work?
While acoustic guitars and basses create the sound from strings, amplified by the soundhole, electric guitars and basses use a different, a more complex way to create sound.
A Stratocaster with three single coil pickups and a Les Paul with two humbucker pickups
Every electric guitar has pickups – a device, that “picks up” vibrations of the strings, converting them into a sound. There are two types of pickups: humbuckers and single coils. The difference between them is the sound they make: a humbucker creates a warm and “humming” sound with more lower mid frequencies, which sounds better if overdriven and is more suitable for heavy styles of music: metal, punk, etc. while single coil pickups make a more crunchy or “attacking” sound with more high frequencies which is used in a wide range of genres from jazz and blues to pop and light styles of rock music. The sound also depends on the pickup position which you’re using when playing the guitar. Depending on the type of guitar you’re using it can have either 2 or 3 pickups: a bridge pickup, sometimes a middle pickup and a neck pickup. You can switch between them and create many interesting guitar tones using different positions. The bridge pickup usually has a warmer sound than the rest and is always more suitable for distortion or overdrive in any pickup type, while neck pickup gets you a sound closer to a typical single coil sound, even if you’re using humbuckers the neck position will always sound similar to a single coil. A middle pickup position is pretty much self-explanatory, it activates both the neck and the bridge pickups, getting you a sound that is something middle between the other 2 pickup position. The only difference between a middle pickup position and a middle pickup is the way it creates the middle sound. If your guitar has a middle pickup, it will have five pickup positions instead of the three with two pickups, and when using the middle position it will get the sound directly from the middle pickup instead of activating both neck and bridge ones.
How does an electric guitar work?
After the pickups get the string sound, the sound is sent to an amplifier where its amplified and overdriven if needed. There are two “shapes” and three types of amps: a head and a combo amp, which can be either analog, tube, or digital. In a head amp, you connect your guitar to the head amp, and then connect the head to the guitar cabinet, the “speaker” where the guitar sound will come from, while if you’re using a combo amp, which two in one: a guitar amp and a cab in one box, all you have to do is to plug the guitar in, and you’re ready to jam.
A head amplifier, a guitar cabinet, and a combo amp.
How does an electric guitar work?
If you love making experiments with effects to achieve your own tone, you can use guitar effect pedals. Effect pedals are devices that you plug your guitar in and then plug them into the amp, so your guitar’s signal gets processed with effects before it gets amplified. You can get a wide range of tones and effects even with a single pedal, as the tone can be completely different depending on the pedal settings, your amp settings, and if you’re using several pedals, the tone will vary depending on the order of pedals in your pedalboard, for example if you put a harmonizer pedal next to a distortion pedal in the chain, it will pitch shift the distorted sound as if two guitars were playing, and if you do the opposite, the harmonized signal will be distorted, and it will sound like you’re playing a chord. There is a pedal for pretty much every guitar effect you can make with an amp or in a studio computer from delay and reverb to expression, overdrive and modulation effects. And what is even better, you can turn the effects on and off by simply stomping your leg on it, which allows you to manage everything when playing live.
A pedalboard
Kurt Cobain playing live with his Boss DS-2 distortion pedal
How does an electric guitar work?
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6k2ghtbhoU&ab_channel=Metallica
There are also other ways to manage guitar tone and effects live. For example Metallica have guitar techs in the backroom of the stage that manage all the guitar gear: amps, effects, cabs, EQ and so on, so the band doesn’t have to spend time on managing all that stuff and can finally focus on playing and singing.
Kurt Cobain is unarguably one of the people who have changed rock music, as after the release of album “Nevermind” in 1991 he literally had killed mainstream glam rock, replacing it with a lot of alternative rock bands that used to be a part of the underground culture: grunge bands like Soundgarden and Pearljam, pop punk bands like Green Day etc. But his success has also became the reason of his death, since when he created Nirvana it was meant to be an underground grunge band, but the track Smells Like Teen Spirit had turned the band into the icon of the new mainstream rock music, completely opposite to what the band was supposed to be. So eventually he burnt out, lost interest in music and had commited suicide in his residence in April 1994, causing the band to collapse.
Nirvana during Nevermind photo sessions
The band during Bleach (their first album) sessions
Icons of American Music
Axl Rose (left) and Kurt Cobain (right) on MTV
Before the major success in 1991, Axl Rose, the lead singer of the band Guns N’ Roses, which is, by the way, considered to be the last classic (glam) rock band, has noticed Nirvana’s work, and even offered them some financing/help with boosting their popularity as he didn’t see alternative rock as a major threat to his band and really liked the music Nirvana played back in 1989-1990, but Kurt had rejected the offer anyway, and after release of Smell Like Teen Spirit Kurt and Axl became enemies as Axl had realized what a threat Kurt actually is to his music.
Icons of American Music
Stats of the most popular music genre among teens
in the US as of Q1 2023
Nirvana’s success had very large consequences on music in general, as after death of glam rock everyone who was a classic rock fan had became a part of new bands’ fanbases, and surprisingly, mainstream rock music has remained the same since then, the only thing that has changed are bands: Pearljam, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains have been replaced with bands like Shinedown, Seether, Alter Bridge etc. But rock is also slowly dying as a mainstream genre, since it has remained the same for more than 30 years and nothing new to come yet, which was one of the reasons why glam rock had died so fast. And while glam rock was being replaced by another rock genre, nowadays, if mainstream rock dies, it won’t be replaced by another rock genre, it’ll most likely just drown in comparably low quality pop and trap music, which is very sad to realize.
Listen to good music!
Mykhailo Baziukevych
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