The Guitar

Today JP, a guitar teacher from Musiqhub, came to talk to us about how the guitar works.

The guitar has a headstock with six tuning pegs.
When you twist a tuning peg it makes the string tighter or looser.
When the string gets loosened, the note goes lower and then gets too loose to make a sound.
When the string gets tighter, the note gets higher but the string can snap if it is too tight.

The neck is the long wooden part.
There are frets across the neck that help you know where to put your finger to change notes.

The large part is the body. It has a pick guard which stops you scratching the guitar.
The bridge holds the strings up off the body.
The body has a hole in it called a sound hole.

There are six strings: E, A, D, G, B, E (from low to high).
The thickest string plays the lowest note (low E) . The thinnest string plays the highest note (high E).

When the string is plucked, it vibrates. It looks thicker but is wobbling up and down fast.
The sound of the note goes into the sound hole and vibrates inside the body and gets louder.
The body of an acoustic guitar is a sound chamber which amplifies the sound.
An electric guitar uses electric speakers to make the sound louder.

JP played us two pieces.
He used a pick to play an ACDC song to make a harder brighter sound.
He plucked the strings with his finger to make a softer warmer sound when he played Sponge Bob.

Self Portraits

We have finished our self portraits and thought you'd like to see them.
They'll be up to see in class soon.

We took photographs of ourselves then cut around them onto black paper to create a silhouette.
We then painted some bold colours onto paper.
We cut different sized circles out and glued them onto our silhouettes.
For our background, we drew pictures of things we like in white crayon.
We then dyed our page a bright colour.
We hope you like them!

Visiting Musician

Today we had Shaun O'Kane visit our class from Musiqhub.
He showed us some different instruments and explained to us how they work.

Brass Instruments
He taught us how brass instruments make sound by blowing or 'buzzing'.
He said you stretch your lips like an e, then blow them together like a b.

Trombone:
He moved the trombone slide down longer or up shorter to change the note.
He said if he blowed gently, it was a quiet sound
If he blowed hard it was a loud sound

Trumpet
On the trumpet, he moved his fingers on the valves,
it opened and closed the pipes and made them longer or shorter.
That made the notes higher (a short pipe) or lower (a long pipe).
He could change the sound without moving his fingers too.
If he changed his mouth so his lips were tighter, he could play different notes called 'overtones'

Saxophone
The saxophone is a conical pipe - it gets wider as it goes down.
The buttons open holes to make the pipe long or short.
You can blow harder to get higher notes called overtones.
As he opened up the holes, the notes got higher.
The saxophone and clarinet have a reed mouthpiece
When you blow, the reed vibrates.
The saxophone didn't sound very good without the reed!
It sounded funny with a trumpet mouthpiece on!

He also showed us a whistle.

We learnt a lot about sound!

 We had fun playing the mouthpieces