Week Three - Identifying Instruments (Part 1)

This week we looked at the main five groups of instruments: the modern drum kit, percussion, bass, guitar, and keyboards. In various combinations these have made a large percentage of records of the past 50 years. We saw that the 'back beat' drum pattern (kick drum on the 1st and 3rd beat of a 4/4 bar, snare on the 2nd and 4th) is the foundation of many rock records, and has stayed basically the same from Elvis through to more recent bands such as And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead. The ability to identify these groups of instruments both visually and by ear is essential to a live sound engineer and tour manager. Some instruments within these groups (such as the Fender Rhodes) are maybe less important to be able to identify than others, but a good knowledge of them will certainly be helpful. The Powerpoint slides will help with being visually familiar and the tracks in the playlist (see below) should help you recognise the sound of them. If you have access to Logic or Garage Band, the sampler instruments included are very helpful in this area (especially the individual parts of a drum kit). At the end we used Logic samples to see which of these instruments worked better in different genres.

Playlist