MusicIt’s well known that ever since the beginning of the Ages men have tried to create and reproduced sounds. As time passes, some people have concerned about creating musical instruments and others about composing music itself.
This text has three articles, two about music composers. One classic: the famous Antonio Vivaldi; the other, popular: Moacir Santos. The third and last article tells us about the electric guitar and its principles of working.
The great Moacir SantosAt present, if you get a radio, you will only hear the commercial music. The singers, in major times, are the names that are in the magazines, on TV on Monday afternoons. But the Brazilian music is not only this. We have “sertanejo”, “axé” and other things of the same kind. Brazil has great names of good music. The subject of the web project is to try to say about one of them. Moacir Santos was considered a genius for all those who understand about music. He was born in Pernambuco, lived in Rio and moved to the United States in 1960. There, he had a great career, but in Brazil, few people know who he was. Santos played sax, but he wasn’t only a sax player. His job as a music arranger was much appreciated. I want to write about the music that left Brazil to live from the music in another place. Santos died in 2006, a little time after his music arrived to be heard in his country. He was almost 80 years old. People who want to know Moacir Santos can listen to “Ouro Negro” (Negro Gold), a double CD with beautiful compositions of his.
When the first electric guitar was invented, it revolutionized the music and simplified the “life” of the musicians with equipment smaller than the acoustic one. Despite the electric guitar was invented almost seventy years ago, its working principles remain the same until nowadays and will be explained below:
1- The interaction between the strings and the guitar body
When you press a string, a song is heard and it is possible because the string produces a mechanic wave that is resounded on the guitar body, making the characteristic sound of the guitar. This stage is equal of an acoustic guitar, but the acoustic guitar has a louder sound because of the acoustic box of its body. The electric guitar doesn't have an acoustic box because its sound is amplified by an electric way through the pick ups, as it’s shown below.
2- The Pick up
A pick up, basically, consists in a group of magnets covered by coils. In this stage, the mechanic sound wave is converted to electric waves. These are the following stages:
– When electric guitar strings, which must be made of steel and the pick up magnets, get close, a magnetic field is generated.
– When a string is pressed a magnetic field variation happens.
– This magnetic field variation, which has the same draw of the above generated mechanic sound wave, is picked up and induced as electric current by the coils.
3- Output Stage
In almost all electric guitars, the entire pick up coils are connected to a volume and to a tone control that are different stages; after these stages, we have the output connector that will be connected to an amplifier through a cable.
Project from
Daniel Góes SilveiraMauro RadescaFábia Oliveira PratesSteps 6
Teacher Maria SilviaCentro Britânico
Pompéia Branch
