Two or Four Guitar Lessons at Rick's Guitar Lessons (50% Off)
Ideal for adult learners looking to develop musical skills at any stage. Weekly lessons build a strong foundation and progress efficiently.
ohJChoose Between Two Options
- $45 for two half-hour guitar lessons (a $100 value)
- $90 for four half-hour guitar lessons (a $200 value)
instructors like Rick Russo and John Pondel can teach you how to master all types of a guitars power.
Electric Guitars: Turning a Magnet into Music
Its
a common high-school experiment: moving a magnet through a coil of
copper wire to create a tiny electric current. But like anything else
found in high schools, this principle proved ideal fodder for rebellion
and exploration. Electric guitars create sound when metal strings
vibrate within a magnetic field generated by the pickup. The current
generated by the now-magnetized string is fed into an amplifier, which
then broadcasts the pitch of the plucked string. These complex
interactions make the electric guitars sound more expansive and
unpredictable than other instruments, making it a key character in the
story of early rock n roll.
Players discovered one unique
property of the instrument early on when they overloaded their speakers
with volume, clipping the tops of the sound waves and creating harsher,
fuzzier sounds. Later, players began intentionally applying effects
devices, such as the wah-wah pedal, which modulates sounds into a
register that resembles a trumpet or human voice. Other distinctive
enhancements include the whammy bar (also called a tremolo or vibrato
arm), which modulates pitch at the touch of a hand by tightening and
loosening the strings to create the dive-bomb sound made famous by
surf guitarists and such psychedelic innovators as Jimi Hendrix.
The
first truly modern electric guitar arose in the early 1930s. George
Beauchamp, a Los Angeles musician, was dissatisfied with early
experiments with attaching amplifiers to acoustic guitarsthey created
feedback and their signals were weak. Working at home, Beauchamp created
a primitive pickup by coiling his wire with such improvised tools as
the motor of his familys washing machine. The resulting guitar had a
tiny body taken up almost completely by the ad hoc pickup, earning it
the nickname the Frying Pan.