Popular Musical Instruments

	Popular Musical Instruments			Indian Musical instruments
	Guitar - Soft, Folk, Jazz Accordion Alto Sax Bagpipe Banjo Bassoon Bell (musical instrument) Brass Instruments Bugle Gong & Tam Tam Wood Bass Finger Bass Celesta Cello Clarinet Clavi Cuatro Conga & Bongo Didgeridoo Drums French Horn Gong Harp Harmonica Harpsichord Keyboard Mandolin Marimba Mbira Mouth Organ Oboe Pan Flute Piano Pipe Organ Rattle & Shaker Saxophone Scraper Tambourine Trombone Trumpet Tuba Ukelele Vibraphone Violin Woodwind Xylophone			Harmonium Sitar Tabla Tanpura Sarangi Sarod Dhol Shehnai Dholak Jal Tarang Pakhawaj Mridangam Santoor Vichitra Veena Veena Basuri - Flute Conch Ek Tara

Electronic Instruments

An electronic musical instrument is a musical instrument that produces its sounds using electronics. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical audio signal that ultimately drives a loudspeaker.

An electronic instrument may include a user interface for controlling its sound, often by adjusting the pitch, frequency, or duration of each note. However, it is increasingly common for the user interface and sound-generating functions to be separated into a music controller (input device) and a music synthesizer, respectively, with the two devices communicating through a musical performance description language such as MIDI or Open Sound Control.

All electronic musical instruments can be viewed as a subset of audio signal processing applications. Simple electronic musical instruments are sometimes called sound effects; the border between sound effects and actual musical instruments is often hazy.

French composer and engineer Edgard Varèse created a variety of compositions using electronic horns, whistles, and tape. Most notably, he wrote Poème Électronique for the Phillips pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958.

Electronic musical instruments are now widely used in most styles of music. The development of new electronic musical instruments, controllers, and synthesizers continues to be a highly active and interdisciplinary field of research. Specialized conferences, notably the International Conference on New interfaces for musical expression, have organized to report cutting edge work, as well as to provide a showcase for artists who perform or create music with new electronic music instruments, controllers, and synthesizers.These are some of the newer musical instruments that have been produced in recent years with the advent of technology. Most of them are designed to reproduce the sounds of existing musical instruments in a simple and user-friendly way. Some of the common electronic instruments include:

• piano keyboards
• octopads
• rhythm machines
• samplers
• synthesizers.

String Instruments

All your guitars, violins and pianos fall under the category of string instruments. String instruments work on the basis of sound wave vibrations that are created with the help of strings. The pitch of the sound note produced depends on the length of the air column as well as the type and thickness of the string involved. Some of the famous string instruments are

• guitar
• piano
• viola 
• sitar   
• cello  
• double 
• bass
• mandolin
• banjo
• harp
• sarod
• santoor.

Brass Instruments

All those shiny trumpets and trombones that feature so prominently in jazz and blues music are classic examples of brass instruments. Brass instruments are named so, not because all of them are made from brass, but because of the nature and texture of the sound that they produce. They work on pretty much the same principle as wind instruments, with a few modifications here and there. In case of brass instruments, the length of the air column can be changed using press-valves or through a slide mechanism. Some of the popular brass instruments are:

• trumpet
• trombone
• bugle
• conch
• tuba
• french horn.

Percussion Instruments

Percussion instruments require a person to strike or beat the instrument surface in order to generate vibrations, which then produce the desired sound note. Depending on the type of surface, one can use one's hands, sticks, or other similar objects for striking the instrument surface. A characteristic feature of percussion instruments is that the type of sound produced varies depending on the spot that is struck on the instrument surface. For example, in case of the djembe, striking it at the center produces a deep and muffled sort of thump, whereas striking it at the edges produces a sharp and crisp sound which is totally different from the earlier one. Some of the well-known percussion instruments are:

• drum
• congo
• djembe
• tabla
• duff
• dhol
• nagara
• cymbals
• bells
• xylophone
• marimba.  

Wind instruments

A wind instrument is a musical instrument that contains some type of resonator  (usually a tube), in which a column of air is set into vibration by the player blowing into (or over) a mouthpiece  set at the end of the resonator. The pitch of the vibration is determined by the length of the tube and by manual modifications of the effective length of the vibrating column of air. In the case of some wind instruments, sound is produced by blowing through a reed; others require buzzing into a metal mouthpiece Wind instruments require a person to blow into the instrument in order to produce the desired sound. They work on the principle of sound waves, frequencies, harmonics, resonance and acoustics. When you blow into the instrument, the pitch of the sound note produced, varies depending on the length of the internal air column in which the sound waves vibrate. The shorter the air column, the higher is the pitch of the note produced, and vice-versa. Some of the popular wind instruments are:

    * flute
    * piccolo
    * shakuhachi
    * clarinet
    * bassoon
    * english horn
    * oboe
    * accordion
    * saxophone
    * shehnai
    * bagpipe
    * pianica
    * harmonica.

A Yamaha piccolo.

Flute

Different Types of Musical Instruments

Three summer vacations and one Christmas break is what it took for me to understand that music  is a deep and bottomless sea, devoid of any boundaries. Every single musical instrument, right from the African djembe to the Indonesian gamelan angklung, and the Arabic shababa to the Indian sitar, is a testament to the fact that music is a universal language having multiple dialects. The tongue twisters that some of these musical instrument names are, it took me a while just to get their names right! Anyway, the sheer magnitude of the different musical instruments that I was exposed to from all over the world was mesmerizing and it left me spellbound. It awakened an inner desire which soon manifested into a deep curiosity about the different types of musical instruments existing in the world. I set out on a melodic journey of discovery and here is what I unearthed in the process:

  

Musical instruments from all over the world can broadly be categorized as follows:

• wind instruments
• percussion instruments
• brass instruments
• string instruments
• electronic instruments