The guitar has sat somewhat quietly in the background for over a thousand years. You can see it when you look through history in many different forms.
From the lute, to the Egyptian "Lan" and then up to the more recent ways we recognize it, acoustic guitar and electric guitar.
No matter what shape it has taken on over the ages it has always been a very important part of collaboration in music. It can very easily be played alone and make a beautiful tune, or it can be accompanied by several other instruments to form an entire symphony. OK, so maybe symphony is going a bit far, but did you know the piano is actually a stringed instrument? Yes indeed the guitar and piano share much of their tones and accents with one another. So, perhaps we could envision Beethoven or Mozart strumming away on a gorgeous classical guitar rather than tickling the ivories.
Though it seemed to be nothing more than a supporting instrument for many years some very influential people came around over the years to take the guitar to a whole new stratosphere.
Going back as early as the 1940's, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash started to show us what the guitar can really do on its own. Musicians like Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and a whole slew of blues guitarist such as B.B. King really started to Rock n Roll on the guitar. Showing the world that there were much more than single notes that could be played on this instrument. You could actually take proper scales and turn those into songs, and what we would later describe as solos. This truly changed the face of the guitar as it was. Taking this amazing instrument from a background strumming to the front-line of the stage and blowing minds across the globe.
From these initial scales and "new notes" that were discovered came a whole new movement on the guitar which some of the most famous musicians were a part of. Jimi Hendrix took them to a different level putting his own psychedelic spin on it. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin took a more traditional look at the blues guitar but sped it up and made it more intricate than anyone had ever even imagined was possible. Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath put a dark twist on everything and thus began the birth of what we now call "metal music."
Once we "discovered" this metal guitar the world of guitar took on a whole new light. With immense speed of these scales like Kirk Hammet of Metallica, speed riffs through scales ranging from old blues all the way up to classical scales that no one had heard of on anything other than a piano. This brought into the lime light amazing guitar players such as Yngwie Malmstein who has shattered many ideas of what the boundaries of a guitar really are. If you have not heard of him I strongly suggest you take a quick peek at what he has to offer. It is truly amazing what he can do with this ancient and beautiful instrument.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6212379
