Electric Bass Guitar

The electric bass guitar (also called electric bass or simply bass) is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb, or by using a plectrum. The bass guitar is similar in appearance and construction to an electric guitar, but with a larger body, a longer neck and scale length, and usually four strings tuned to pitches one octave lower than those of the four lower strings of a guitar (E, A, D, and G).

A.4. PIANO 99 A.3.1 Slap

The slap is a very common technics in bass playing. The attack consist to hit the string with the thumb, in the begining of the fretboard, like a hammer. The resulting sound is almost completely percussive at the attack and after the sinusoidal regime appears. Note that a note play by slap have a small duration compared to a note played with the finger.

A.4 Piano

The piano is a musical instrument which is played by means of a keyboard. Widely used in Western music for solo performance, ensemble use, chamber music, and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal. Although not portable and often expensive, the piano’s versatility and ubiquity have made it one of the most familiar musical instruments. In a piano, the sound generation mechanism works as follows:

when the musician presses a key, a hammer strikes the string (or actually between one and three strings, depending on the key) and this interaction triggers the note. When the key is released, a damper comes to stop the vibration of the strings and the note fades out.

A.4.1 Forte Pedal

The Forte Pedal is also called the sustain pedal or simplyThe pedal, since it’s the most used pedal. When the sustain pedal is pressed, all the dampers of the piano are kept raised; this allows the strings to keep vibrating after the key is released, and allows strings associated to other keys to vibrate, due to sympathetic resonance, and coupling via the bridge. If several notes are played with the pedal, they will be mixed with a longer duration. A second effect has yet to be noticed. As a matter of fact, the two higher octaves of the piano do not have any damper, but the use of the pedal still has an influence on the sound. For this range of notes, the note does not last longer with or without the pedal, but a natural reverberation due to the resonance of the sound board appears and this sound leads to an additional floor noise.

Figure A.2: A violin

100APPENDIX A. INSTRUMENTS AND INTERPRETATION EFFECTS: DESCRIPTION

Figure A.3: Pizzicato

A.4.2 Practice Pedal

On many upright pianos, there is a middle pedal called thepractice or celeste pedal. This drops a piece of felt between the hammers and strings, greatly muting the sounds. This is generally used for training but.

A.5 Guitar

The guitar is a musical instrument with ancient roots that was adapted readily to a wide variety of musical styles. It typically has six strings, but four-, seven-, eight-, ten-, eleven-, twelve-, thirteen- and eighteen-string guitars also exist. The size and shape of the neck and the base of the guitar also vary, producing a variety of sounds. The two main types of guitars are the electric guitar and the acoustic guitar (of which the three main types are the classical guitar, the steel-string flattop guitar, and the archtop guitar).

Figure A.4: Electric Bass (5 strings)

A.5. GUITAR 101

Figure A.5: Slap example

Figure A.6: Soft (left), pratice (middle) and sustain pedals (right)

102APPENDIX A. INSTRUMENTS AND INTERPRETATION EFFECTS: DESCRIPTION Guitars are recognized as one of the primary instruments in flamenco, jazz, blues, country, mariachi, rock music, and many forms of pop. They can also be a solo classical instrument. Guitars may be played acoustically, where the tone is produced by vibration of the strings and modulated by the hollow body,

Figure A.7: Electro-Classical Guitar

A.5.1 Palm mute

Palm mutes are executed by placing the side of the picking hand across all of the strings and very close to the bridge before or during the attack. This produces a muted sound.

While rare in classical guitar technique, palm muting is a standard technique on an electric guitar, Plam mute is more used when the musician play with a pick.

A.5.2 Slide, Bend and Hammer

There exists a lot of interpretation effects for the guitar, here we focus on three of them which have a similar caracteristic: the bend, the hammer and the slide. The bend is the action of deforming the string by pulling it up or down for increasing its length and changing the frequency. For the hammer, after a played note another finger come and strike another frette and become the new note. The slide, also called Glissando, is the action of sliding the finger to anoter frette.

Figure A.8: PalmMute

103

Appendix B

Tools

In this chapter we present the tools used for the detection of playing defects and inter-pretation effects. A part of the tools (and associated results for the interinter-pretation effects detection) were implemented on a real time simulator developed by the startup SigTone [1].

This simulator was presented during the Grand Colloque STIC 2006 (with a high back-ground noise) in Lyon, and was ranked in the first eight best projects of the competition.