Electric Guitars, Synths, and Keyboards for the Curious
You listen to music, but what do you know about how it is made today?
What spawned me to write this article is the fact that I found myself trying to explain to my wife and my parents about how an electrical guitar and a synthesizer works and the whole ecosystem around these different instruments.
For instance, you don't merely buy an electrical guitar, and you are done. No, you have to hook it up to a guitar amplifier (amp for short).
There is a large selection of these amplifiers with different characteristics and settings. But the madness doesn't end there. There is a huge selection of colorful little boxes called guitar pedals (or effect units) which you plug in between your guitar and your amplifier to alter the sound of your guitar or do a myriad of other things such as record the sound so you can play as if you got two guitars.
Some effect unit (guitar pedal) examples:
Distortion Pedal – Distorts the sound to give the aggressive sound of a rock music.
Fuzz Pedal – Even heavier distortions.
Looper Pedal – Record and play back earlier played sound.
Reverb Pedal – Create an echo sound.
Tremolo Pedal – Fluctuates your guitar’s volume very quickly for a sort of staggering, “wobbling” sound.
Tuner Pedal – Strum your guitar strings to figure out which ones are out of tune.
Synthesizers are no different. You can plug the into a variety of units which alter the sound output in different ways. In fact, a synthesizer itself is akin to a collection of effect units bundled into one unit where you tweak numerous dials to get a desired sound out.
And what I just described to you is only one angle to look at this or work with music today. Digital computers and advanced software has created a whole new alternative universe where you can plug guitars and synthesizers into computers and use advanced software to modify, edit and tweak the sound output.
This can be taken to extremes. Instead of plugging in a specific hardware synthesizer to your computer to record audio from it you can buy that particular synthesizer as a software simulator. In other words you can produce the sound of a particular piece of hardware entirely in software.
You can to this for electrical pianos, keyboards, synthesizers, drums, drum machines and even, to some degree, guitars. But how do you play on these software pianos? Do you hit keys on your keyboard? That doesn't work very well does it? For starters, a regular keyboard, for typing letters, don't register how fast or hard you tap a key.
Furthermore, your typing keyboard isn't arranged in a way that matches a piano and thus skills learned to play doesn't transfer well.
Turns out there is a solution to this called MIDI controllers. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. MIDI controllers are akin to a keyboard you plug into your computer to type letters. The difference is that a MIDI controller can be shaped like a piano keyboard and have weighted keys. Weighted keys mean that when you hit a key it transmits to your computer not only what key was hit but also how fast it was hit. This lets you mimic the playing on a piano. With a real physical piano, a slow touch produces a faint sound. If you hit a piano key faster and harder it will produce a louder sound.
Examples of MIDI controllers:
MIDI keyboard – A MIDI keyboard is a specific type of MIDI controller that is designed to look and feel like a traditional piano keyboard.
MIDI Equalizer – Actually not a thing, but you can get controllers kind of looking like an equalizer which can be used as one.
This is where things start getting complex. It means you can get something that looks like a keyboard or synthesizer. Even feels like one but isn't. Judging by my explanation for friends and family of this, some of you will go: Wait how is this keyboard thingy different from another keyboard thingy?
Okay, let me rephrase to clarify the difference: While a MIDI controller and a musical keyboard can look exactly the same, they don't to the same thing inside.
A music keyboard has electronic circuits to produce sounds internally. Or more specifically, it can produce electrical signals which, when connected to an amplifier, produce sounds on a speaker. A MIDI controller cannot do this because it only sends info about what the key you pressed and how fast you pressed it. Actually, that is not entirely correct. To quote from the wiki on MIDI:
Each interaction with a key, button, knob or slider is converted into a MIDI event, which specifies musical instructions, such as a note's pitch, timing and loudness. One common MIDI application is to play a MIDI keyboard or other controller and use it to trigger a digital sound module (which contains synthesized musical sounds) to generate sounds, which the audience hears produced by a keyboard amplifier.
The beauty of this system is that the musical keyboard you play on could be separated from the hardware that generates the sounds. You can buy separate modules for generating sounds which you can plug a keyboard into using a MIDI cable.
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