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Guitars, Musical Instruments, Downloads and more

Music is one of the most ancient and time honored arts humanity has. It predates buildings, it predates professions (sorry prostitutes, musicians were there first) and it predates cave paintings. How do we know it predates cave drawings? Well there are cave drawings of musical instruments and people using them, which tends to lend credence to the thought that they were there before someone decided to draw them on the wall. In fact, music may even predate our use of tools as a species, although musical instruments certainly do not.

Musical instruments can be made from just about anything; you only have to look at Youtube for living examples of musicians using anything from spoons to their own bodies as an instrument. Beat boxing is the term used to define someone making different percussion sounds utilizing only their own body. It is an impressive art form in its own right; but it is miniscule when compared to the scope of music as a whole.

As an art form, music has a rich history, one of the musical instruments that have been… well instrumental (pardon the pun) to the development of music is the guitar. The guitar is an impressive instrument because it is one of the few that can utilize multiple voices at the same time. Instruments like flutes, violins, saxophones, violas, and the like can only really produce one tune per instrument. There is some limited potential for harmonizing in violas and violins, but most of their harmony comes from multiple people playing different parts. A skilled guitarist can easily produce two or even three voices with a single instrument, which has been a mainstay of the instrument’s evolution into the most popular musical instrument of our day.

The forefather of the guitar is primarily the lute, which is an instrument that has been around since ancient times. There are a few differences between lutes and guitars; the most defining difference is the shape of the body. A guitar has a flat backside that’s connected in cylindrical fashion to the front. The back of a lute, on the other hand, is a single rounded piece, rather than the two piece back-and-side setup a guitar uses. Another striking difference is the sound hole. The hole on a guitar is open, while the hole on a lute is usually a decorative piece of ornamental work that involves a myriad of small piercings on the body in a predetermined design.

One of the most recent developments in the music world is also one with much potential, one that has generated a lot of excitement. I’m talking of course about digital music downloads. They started as the music industry’s perceived antichrist when they were being offered for free by services such as Napster and then Kazaa; but the industry has developed a somewhat uneasy truce with digital music downloads in the form of iTunes. iTunes allows users to purchase music, either by the disc or by the song individually. It has become a marketing behemoth; in fact music downloads were the only sector of the music industry to record growth during the year 2008. They are the future of the industry, and the Apple business model has given the industry a successful blueprint to work from.

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