The Electric Guitar Instrumentation Guide
Introduction
The electric guitar, hero of twentieth century musical instruments, played by so many people, enjoyed by countless numbers of audiences: what a colourful contribution to the musical cultures of almost every corner of this planet!
And yet a seemingly difficult instrument to understand and write for, to ‘classical’ composers. Social-cultural reasons may have played a considerable role in the past for the limited use of the electric guitar in composed music, but these high art/low art discussions are for the most part behind us. Still, writing for the electric guitar represents many stilistic and/or technical challenges to the present-day composer. Fortunately, the incorporation of electronically amplified sounds in chamber music and orchestral music has become quite ‘ordinary’. This definitely helps the thinking about the acoustic effects of combining classical instruments and loudspeakers. That is a good start, but many issues remain to be addressed, bef we fully use the possibilities of this crazy instrument!
Goals of The Electric Guitar Instrumentation Guide
The Electric Guitar Instrumentation Guide aims to be a practical guide for composers and guitarists alike, who deal with the electric guitar as a medium for contemporary composed music. Questions that are being addressed in this book are: composers and guitarists, what should they expect from each other? How can they communicate about these new sounds? Enabling the composer to ask educated questions to guitarists they write for is one goal of this book. Another goal is suggesting ways of notation and discussing literature examples that show ways of creative use of the electric guitar both as a solistic and as an ensemble instrument.
The structure of the book
This book consists of two main parts. The first part is about ‘the hardware’, the machinery so to speak. The second part is about ‘the software’, about how the machinery is being used. So, for example, in the section about ‘effects’, one finds the chapter about volume-related effects. In this chapter the various pedals and knobs and their technical features are being described. In the second part of this book, in the section ‘the use of effects’, there is also a chapter about volume-related effects. Here the musical use of these effects is being discussed, including notation issues and score excerpts. This structure is chosen to provide the reader with as much useful information as possible, that is as easy to find as possible. A group of specialised guitarists and composers has participated in the discussions about notation and other aspects of the information provided.
Download and invitation to a dicussion
I decided to publish the first part on the OUTPUT Festival website. You can download the text as a pdf file. I'd love to get some feedback about these chapters from international guitarists and others interested in this topic. What's more is that I hope to start a dicussion on the notation for this instrument. So please feel welcome to leave your comments, corrections and other remarks in the forum!
Wiek Hijmans
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