I actually take issue with classifying electric and electronic instruments as their own category, even though I used taht categorization scheme in my earlier post.
Electric instruments don’t make sound until their electric signals pass through a loudspeaker. A loudspeaker is a membrane attached to an electromagnetic coil that is driven by those electrical signals. If there were a physical way of driving the membrane of the loudspeaker at audible frequencies without the use of electronics, it would still make the same kinds of sounds.
Well, electronics aside, if you class what you’ve listed as “stuff you hit, stuff you pluck, or stuff you blow”, then “stuff you bow” would be another category - violiny stuff, no idea on the invention of those, but local Bushmen use a one-string version, so I imagine that’s almost as old as “stuff you pluck”
However, there is another category, “stuff you stroke with wet fingers”, that requires fairly decent glass, so I believe glass armonica- and glass harp- type stuff may be the last category of acoustic music making introduced.
(Possible nitpick) Was the first Theremin a VCO? I believe it was controlled by two capacity sensors; one, for volume and one for pitch. But was it a VCO inside?
There were other synthesizers built in the early days using other kinds of controls, but the VCO was what made a musical instrument really practical for control and pitch purposes, IMHO.
I don’t play one, but I had the pleasure of jamming with Emmett Chapman in the 70’s and he showed me how it worked. The original model, IIRC, had guitar strings and bass strings on the same fingerboard. The guitar strings were strung parallel to, but in the opposite direction to, the bass strings. One hand usually played each group, but fingers could cross over. It looks like the instrument has been frequently modified since then, so I don’t know if it is still made eactly like that.
Another difference between the Stick and a guitar is that the strings are “tapped” and set vibrating just by the percussive motion of pressing them against the fret. You can do this with any guitar, but the volume of sound created is very low. Chapman had to make a very low noise amplifier with a high gain to compensate for the weak sound.
And the sousaphone would trump that one, since it came 50 years later. (If you count it as a separate instrument, of course – it’s basically a redesigned tuba.)
I am going to vote for samplers, specifically the mellotron, the first sample driven instrument (well, maybe not quite the first, but the defining instrument). 70 pieces of tape, 8 seconds long each, mechanically driven.
You could have splits, and selectable sounds, if you didn’t mind reloading all those tapes. People soon realised you could do really trippy things with one - like Rick Wakeman. And you could record your own samples.
Revolutionary in it’s own way, and completely different from true synths. It set the eventual direction and feature set of modern digital keyboards. Of course, it got lost once digital samplers were developed, and the goal of a sampler became increasingly accurate simulation of existing instruments. But a sampler can be so much more if you have imagination.
Eh? An electric guitar, for example, has strings that vibrate when plucked. There are little microphones underneath each string that pick up the sound and send it to the amplifier. They make a sound independent of a loudspeaker being attached.
Terminus Est, surely you will accept the fact that some instruments are acoustic first, then electronically amplified, while others have their sound created in a non-acoustic environment, like a computer program, then sent to speakers without any air vibrations first?
I think the latter is what scotandrsn was talking about, or synthesized sounds.
Yes, and the fact that a non-amplified electric guitar, while not silent, is also not technically electric at that point. It’s just a regular guitar with lousy resonance.
Dunno if this counts as a “new instrument,” but in 1988 somebody invented something called a “velvet horn,” which is essentially a French horn made of wood instead of brass – supposed to produce a more mellow tone.
No cite, I just remember the year because I was a newspaper copy editor at the time and there was a wire story on it.
Yes, if I’m understanding the question right. They used vacuum tubes of course, and might have been current controlled versus voltage controlled but definitely the tones were produced by beating various frequencies against each other. RCA made one model, if not the first they are quite rare and fairly valuable today. Figure $8-10k! I can probably dig up a schematic if you want.
What about a DJ’s turntable? Unlike a plain old record player, it has a bunch of knobs and buttons to tweak the rotation speed, pitch, and I don’t even know what else. I’ve heard that a good DJ can put on a record consisting of a single note and use the turntable to produce pretty much any other note, and all sorts of other noise too.
The OP’s question has already been answered, but I thought some of our musicians might find this one interesting (plus what the heck, I like Hevia’s music)
While the electronic bagpipe is definitely a “variation on an existing instrument”, my understanding is that it’s also very novel in the electronic parts. The first prototype (which still didn’t play like an acoustic bagpipe at all, although it did sound like one) is from the 1980s. Current ones look and are played like acoustic bagpipes. The advantage is that you can do it without your neighbors calling the cops
I think the PVC instrument deserves serious consideration; the tubulum could be argued to be a member of the xylophone family (and the drumbone would then be a xylo-bone) but the PVC instrument is quite innovative in that it is played by slapping the open ends of the tubes - closest existing instrument I can think of would be the Hawaiian ka eke, but those are just single tubes, not a musically-playable array of them.
