The most beautiful thing about music is that you can enjoy it in two ways. You can listen it and you can play it.
Playing live gives you an unique opportunity to express yourself and feel the contact with the audience. In this section we will cover everything that is connected with playing live. We will discuss instruments or course but also other gear and accessories like guitar amps, effects , loopers and more.
Instruments
There is no music without instruments. Of course you can use your voice only and become human instrument but in most music genres and physical instruments like piano, guitar, trumpet or drums are used. In the era of computerization and modern digital technologies a new branch of instruments was created – software instruments, where the sound is produced by wave generators using specialized software
Physical instruments
Man-made instruments have been known for hundreds, if not thousands of years – they have been with us practically since primitive people lived in caves and made simple instruments, e.g. from animal horns.
Today, the instrument manufacturing industry is a multi-billion dollar business in which there are brands and manufacturers with a long tradition.
- How to choose a guitar – classical versus acoustic
- What are the types of keyboard instruments and how to how to tell them apart
Software instruments
A relatively new field in the world of musical instruments are instruments in which the sound is generated by software.
It is worth emphasizing that this is a completely new field of electronic sound production than analog synthesizers known in the 1980s.
Only recently, various VST plug-ins that are able to emulate sounds using software are quite a new invention compared to analog synthesizers.
We are currently experiencing the flourishing of this type of instruments related to digital synthesis by means of software, which is possible thanks to the enormous computing power of modern personal computers.
Today, we can listen to the burden of the legendary Moog or Jupiter 8 using software that effectively mimics the way these analog synthesizers used to create sound.
Accessories for playing live music
Whether you use hardware or software instruments, there are plenty of accessories on the market to help you perform live and in studio sessions. For electric guitars, you need guitar amps and effects.
The another important group consists of various types of audio mixers, looping stations or pre-amplifiers that we use both with microphones and in the case of analog outputs from instruments such as keyboards or guitar.
You cannot forget about the appropriate cabling and various types of converters and adapters necessary to connect these devices.