Welcome to Dalymusic.com! We are a site dedicated to
helping musicians and music lovers find the instruments and music they
need to help them succeed. We have a wide selection of musical instruments,
and an impressive array of guitars, both electric and acoustic. We also
have information on music downloads, which are fast becoming the largest
portion of the music industry’s sales. We hope you enjoy your
time on our site, and if you have any questions, please feel free to
contact us, by phone or email.
Guitars are an
instrument with some history to them. They are relatively young when
compared to other instruments such as horns, harps, and drums, but that
still gives them several centuries of history. They are a descendant
of the lute, which was one of the first stringed instruments that attached
the strings to a body, rather than a frame. The harp dates back to ancient
Greece, while the lute is believed to be a few centuries younger.
The guitar as we know it differs from a classical lute in a few ways.
The first and most apparent difference is the body style. A lute features
a curved back and no real side pieces. A guitar on the other hand has
a flat back that is parallel to the front, and for acoustic guitars,
there is a large, hollow body created by a curved side that runs at
a right angle to the front and back pieces.
The tonal quality of lutes and guitars are also different. Lutes have
a higher string count than guitars. The classical lute has 15 strings
arranged into pairings which are played together, as if they were a
single string. You might notice that 15 is an odd number, and the highest
pairing on the lute has only 1 string to it.
On the other hand, a guitar comes in two main flavors, six strings,
and twelve strings. To be sure, there are plenty of other variants out
there, but the majority of the market is comprised of these two styles.
Unlike a lute, guitars are one string to a tone. They didn’t come
around until after the baroque lute (which featured a whopping 24 strings!)
and their method of play has developed considerably greater variance
than the lute did.
Much of that development is because the guitar has become the favored
musical instrument of the modern era. Look at any popular band today
and you will see a guitarist. Even the base, which is another staple
of popular music nearly irrespective of genre, is a variant of the guitar.
The genre may not change that the instrument is used, but it does change
the type of guitar a musician uses. A blues guitar is very different
from an acoustic, which is different from a metal electric one.
Another thing that has changed, and especially in the last century or
so, is the method of delivery for music. For most of our history, the
only way for us to hear music was to be there when it was played. There
was no such thing as a recording until the 19th century. Once the idea
took hold, it certainly took off. The 20th century has seen the recording
industry move from vinyl records, through 8 tracks and cassettes, to
CDs, and finally to digital media. Digital media is the type of music
you can download, rather than going out to purchase it from a store.
Today more than a quarter of all industry profits can be traced to music
downloads, rather than brick and mortar store purchases.