Daily Dose of English 179
The Guitar
Daily Dose of English 179
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to, um, how often? Oh, every day, to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about the guitar, the guitar, which is a wonderful instrument that I have learned in the past and really enjoy. It's definitely of my top instruments. I talked about the piano a while ago, which is still my favorite instrument, but The guitar might be a little bit under that. I'm not sure if it's my second favorite or not, but it is definitely high up there. And part of that is because of its It's flexibility, it's ubiquity, so it's able to be used in lots of different kinds of music, lots of different styles. There are dozens of kinds of guitar, which makes it really open-ended, right? So with a piano, there's not really that many... kinds of piano right they sound really similar unless you get into like a keyboard and you can like add whatever sounds you want you can totally change how it sounds but like a traditional piano is only going to have a certain range of sounds but with the guitar you can get anything from a classical nylon string guitar which have like plastic strings that sound really like open and light and airy all the way to an acoustic guitar, which has metal strings. Those sound a little bit like stronger, shinier, I think of their sound is very like shiny and bright. So there's like this light and airiness from classical guitars, sparkly and brightness from acoustic guitars. And then there's electric guitars, which have just a bajillion sounds because they're electric, right? You can totally change how electric guitars sound. which is also really interesting. We'll get to that in a second. But I learned to play the guitar relatively early. I think I talked about this in the piano episode, but I started learning to play music when I was pretty young and I was relatively good at it. And so it was pretty easy for me to pick up instruments, which again, I don't know if I mentioned this, but it kind of also made me not pursue music that much. because I didn't like love, love it. It wasn't like my favorite thing in the world to do. And it was already pretty easy to do like the basics. And so I kind of just like stopped really caring, which is I think sort of normal for people that when something is too easy at the beginning, you don't really get interested in getting better because you can just do the easy thing. And so like, you just sort of stop. I wish that I was a little bit like worse at music naturally. And I had to put more effort and time in to get even better because I would end up, I would be a lot better if I put time in, but I just didn't put any time in. Cause I was like, eh, I don't really care. So I wish that I put more time in. I kind of would like to, when I have more, time in the future I'd love to get a guitar or a piano to practice with and really dedicate some more time to because I think they're really amazing instruments. Anyways, the guitar was the one that I did put a decent amount of time into growing up because it was a lot more interesting, I think, as a kid. It was more relevant in the music that I was listening to every day. And it was also, I think, more sociable, right? It's more, you can do it with more people. My friend was learning guitar. We played Guitar Hero all the time. And so it was more, yeah, it was more of a social thing almost. And the guitar, like starting is actually pretty easy, which is cool. You can learn some chords, which are when you play several notes at once, which sound nice. And you can learn to move between the chords and play some songs and sing relatively quickly, which is great. It's a fantastic way to start and get into music. It's a great beginner instrument and it's also a great expert instrument because there's such a such a high skill ceiling. A skill ceiling is basically how good somebody can possibly get. All instruments have a humongous Ah, skill ceiling. God, I couldn't think of that word. All instruments have a really, really high skill ceiling, because they're just, you can do so many things with them. But not all of them have a low skill floor, right? And that's where like the level where you can be. pretty good without that much time or effort. So like the piano takes a long time to like be able to do really anything because you have to use all of your fingers at once and sort of separate your brain and to make something sound okay. But with the guitar, it's a lot easier to learn shapes and play the strings and just do something. An even lower skill ceiling, or yeah, lower skill ceiling would be No, skill floor, sorry. Even lower skill floor would be something like the ukulele, which is basically a small guitar because there's just fewer strings to play with and it can sound really good in a day of practice. I bet there's some instruments with even, even lower skill floors, but anyways, we're talking about the guitar. Um, I started by playing more typically like rock or metal songs, which is what I, what I enjoyed listening to and focusing on like individual notes and, and playing riffs is a great thing. So riffs is where there's a sequence of notes that, um, you learn, right. To play some, to like sound like something. Um, and learning riffs is always really fun because it's recognizable. It's cool. It sounds like it's good with your music, that sort of thing. um and yeah what was i gonna there was another thing i was going to talk about um i don't remember where do i want to go with this because i could talk about like the the electric guitar yeah you know what let's talk about the electric guitar the electric guitar because that's something that i like i think even more than acoustic guitars because they have this, like you can sort of choose your own sound, you can develop your sound. There are a lot of ways to modify the sound because what's happening is that this instrument that you're playing has these strings that vibrate, but then those strings are being picked up or being like heard by some, not digital, they're not digital, it's an analog electric thing to amplify the sound. which is, um, it's not as fancy as it sounds, but basically you're taking these, this, these notes and turning them into electrical signals, which then can create those notes again, but louder, right? So if you, if you unplug an electric guitar and you play the notes, you still hear them if you put your ear close to them, but it's not very loud because the strings aren't like vibrating enough stuff to create sound. And so an electric guitar takes those vibrations electronically, electrically, and amplifies them to make them much, much, much louder, or a little bit louder, depending on, you can turn up the sound or turn down the sound. Um, but the cool thing is you can pass that sound through filters. Basically, there are things that you can do with electricity to change the frequency of the wave in lots of different ways, which is actually more mathematical than it is like, uh, anything else, which is pretty cool. But what happens is you get these very different sounds. So that still sound to us like a guitar because we know them as guitars, but you can get very different effects on the guitars, which I think is really, really interesting. So one of the most common ones is distortion, where the sound is distorted, changed, or warped a little bit to sound different than what the string is actually doing. This is very common in metal music and a lot of different kinds of musics because you can distort it a lot, a little bit, to get a distinct sound. A good distortion, oh, and by the way, with guitars, it's usually a pedal that is doing the distorting where the sound goes in one side of the pedal, it changes it, and then it puts it out the other side because that way you can turn it on and off with your foot while you're playing the guitar. So you can turn on the distortion, off the distortion just with using your foot instead of like a button. Electric guitarists that are playing for a long time usually develop their own set of pedals that they use often to create their own unique sound. That is like that kind of music. I really only see in guitars. There are plenty of other instruments that do something similar, but I haven't seen it as, like, because the guitar is the most popular, I think probably the most popular instrument in the world. Maybe I'm wrong on that because of like some countries that where it's less popular, but at least in the Western world, it's one of the most popular instruments so that it's one of the most developed like industries almost. I wonder how much the guitar industry itself is worth. Um, and people have just their own different unique sound and whatnot. So anyways, I'm starting to ramble. We're getting to the end of this episode. And, uh, so I just want to say, yeah, the guitar is a great place to start. If you're curious on about music, try to find a secondhand, relatively cheap guitar and just start learning it. It's not, Super duper difficult. It's a lot easier than many other instruments. There are lower barriers to entry. And if you can find a relatively cheap guitar to just start playing with, you can have a lot of fun with music in not too much practice. Just make sure to keep practicing or else your fingers are going to get weak and it's going to hurt a lot. But that is everything for this episode on the guitar. Sorry that it didn't really have a point. But I mean, I guess, do any of these episodes have a point? Probably not. I just talk for like 10 minutes. But anyways, thank you so much for listening. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a little something new. And I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode of A Daily Dose of English with me, with Ben. Have a good one. Bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.