The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, in modern forms usually made of plastic, originally of animal skin.
In music, there are two common meanings for tuning:
The ukulele, also called a uke, is a member of the lute family of instruments of Portuguese origin and popularized in Hawaii. It generally employs four nylon strings.
In musical instrument classification, string instruments, or chordophones, are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when a performer strums, plucks, strikes or sounds the strings in varying manners.
A capo is a device a musician uses on the neck of a stringed instrument to transpose and shorten the playable length of the strings—hence raising the pitch. It is a common tool for players of guitars, mandolins, mandolas, banjos, ukuleles and bouzoukis. The word derives from the Italian capotasto, which means the nut of a stringed instrument. The earliest known use of capotasto is by Giovanni Battista Doni who, in his Annotazioni of 1640, uses it to describe the nut of a viola da gamba. The first patented capo was designed by James Ashborn of Wolcottville, Connecticut year 1850.
The Appalachian dulcimer is a fretted string instrument of the zither family, typically with three or four strings, originally played in the Appalachian region of the United States. The body extends the length of the fingerboard, and its fretting is generally diatonic.
The biwa is a Japanese short-necked wooden lute traditionally used in narrative storytelling. The biwa is a plucked string instrument that first gained popularity in China before spreading throughout East Asia, eventually reaching Japan sometime during the Nara period (710–794).
The cümbüş is a Turkish stringed instrument of relatively modern origin. It was developed in 1930 by Zeynel Abidin Cümbüş as an oud-like instrument that could be heard as part of a larger ensemble.
A chanzy or Chanzi, Tyanzi is a three-stringed lute instrument from the Tuvan Republic. It looks like a long-necked banjo with a skin head glued over a heart or kidney-shaped wooden hoop body. The neck is (660 mm) long and made of pine wood. Some models have frets, others not or only drawn on. Usually it has two similar sound-holes and some painted decoration. It is most commonly used to accompany throat singing. Like on the doshpuluur the three (nylon) strings are tuned by modern guitar tuners, the extra long tuning pegs, on some instruments, are just for decoration. Often the peg-head has a carving of a horse head. It produces a louder tone than the doshpuluur, and is commonly used throughout Central Asia.
In music, strings are long flexible structures on string instruments that produce sound through vibration. Strings are held under tension so that they can vibrate freely. The pitch (frequency) at which a string will vibrate is primarily related to its vibrating length, its tension, and its mass per unit of length. A vibrating string produces very little sound by itself. Therefore, most string instruments have a soundboard to amplify the sound.
The bandurria is a plucked chordophone from Spain, similar to the mandolin and bandola, primarily used in Spanish folk music, but also found in former Spanish colonies.
The tenor guitar or four-string guitar is a slightly smaller, four-string relative of the steel-string acoustic guitar or electric guitar. The instrument was initially developed in its acoustic form by Gibson and C.F. Martin so that players of the four-string tenor banjo could double on guitar.
On a stringed instrument, a break in an otherwise ascending order of string pitches is known as a re-entry. A re-entrant tuning, therefore, is a tuning which does not order all the strings from the lowest pitch to the highest pitch.
A zero fret is a fret placed at the headstock end of the neck of a banjo, guitar, mandolin, or bass guitar. It serves one of the functions of a nut: holding the strings the correct distance above the other frets on the instrument's fretboard. A separate string-guide is still required to establish the correct string spacing when a zero fret is used.
The yaylı tambur is a bowed long-neck lute from Turkey. Derived from the older plucked mızraplı tambur variant of the Turkish tambur, it has a long, fretted neck and a round metal or wooden soundbox which is often covered on the front with a skin or acrylic head similar to that of a banjo.
Billy "Uke" Scott was a British music hall star, who inspired three generations of ukulele players, composing, singing and writing a "teach-yourself" ukulele manual.
Andy Eastwood is a vaudeville entertainer and ukulele player.
A guitalele, also called a ukitar, or kīkū, is a guitar-ukulele hybrid, that is, "a 1/4 size" guitar, a cross between a classical guitar and a tenor or baritone ukulele. The guitalele combines the portability of a ukulele, due to its small size, with the six single strings and resultant chord possibilities of a classical guitar. It may include a built-in microphone that permits playing the guitalele either as an acoustic guitar or connected to an amplifier. The guitalele is variously marketed as a travel guitar or children's guitar. It is essentially a modern iteration of the Quint guitar.
The cuatro of Venezuela has four single nylon strings, tuned (ad'f#'b). It is similar in shape and tuning to the ukulele, but their character and playing technique are vastly different. It is tuned in a similar fashion to the traditional D tuning of the ukulele, but the A and B are an octave lower. Consequently, the same fingering can be used to shape the chords, but it produces a different inversion of each chord. A cuatro player is called a cuatrista.
Kelvin Kirkwood Keech was an American actor, producer and old-time radio announcer.
