Music Composition DUMmIES

Steel guitars are not tuned like conventional guitars, either, and each kind of

steel guitar has its own specific tuning, which can also vary from performer

to performer. Chords are formed with a solid steel slide instead of your hand,

so steel guitars are usually tuned to an open chord, so that only bar chords

have to be formed, such as an open G (D, G, D, G, D, lowest string to highest),

an open A (E, C#, E, A, C#, E), a high G (G, B, D, G, B, D), a high A (A, C#, E, A,

C#, E), a C6 (C, E, G, E, C, A), and so on.

Mucking around with higher tunings like those can really screw up the neck

of a regular guitar (and snap a few strings), hence the additional reinforce-

ment of the neck and the higher gauge of guitar string used on steel guitars.

Free Reed Instruments ................................................................................

The free reed family consists of accordions, concertinas, and harmonicas.

According to Chinese legend, the first known free reed instrument, the cheng,

was created around 3000 B.C. when a scholar named Ling Lun disappeared

into the mountains of China in search of the phoenix. When he returned, he

had not captured the phoenix itself, but had captured its song for mankind.

The cheng, which is still in very limited use today in traditional Chinese

ensembles, is shaped to resemble the phoenix and has between 13 and 24

bamboo pipes, a small gourd which acts as a resonator box and wind cham-

ber, and a mouthpiece. It’s the first instrument known to demonstrate the

free reed principle, which basically means that wind moves over a set of

reeds in either direction to create a specific pitch.

Free reed instruments are different from woodwind and certain brass instru-

ments, which also have reeds and use pressurized air to produce noise but

only produce a pure sound when the air is blown through the mouthpiece.

You don’t suck in through a clarinet’s mouthpiece to play music, but you can

suck air through a harmonica or accordion bellows to produce notes that

sound just as good as when you blow the air out. (Over the centuries, the

cheng evolved into the small, box-like sheng, or Chinese mouth organ, which

was the direct inspiration for the European mouth organ, or harmonica.)

The harmonica....................................................................................

There are two types of harmonicas, one which belongs in the family of free

reed instruments, and one that doesn’t. The one that doesn’t is the one that

first bore the name harmonica. None other than Benjamin Franklin invented

the glass harmonica, which was a much more complicated version of the

Chapter 15: Composing for the Nonstandard Orchestra 193