User:Mr.Hyde41/sandbox

=Disorganized Essay Example=

I've always been interested in music, and learning about different musical instruments. When I was a kid I played clarinet in the school band, and the clarinet has been around for a long time, longer than the saxophone ,but clarinets aren't as old as drums. I was never particularly interested in drumming ,I don't have a good sense of rhythm. Other kinds of instruments have also interested me, eventually I found out that instruments are grouped in families.

The string family, which is instruments that have strings that are bowed or plucked. The most famous is perhaps the violin. There have been many famous violin players such as Jascha Heifetz, this popularity has caused the violin to spread across the world.

Clarinet is a reed instrument, which is an instrument that has a reed you blow through to make the sound. Instead of a string vibrating, the reed vibrates. Using varying pressures and extending or shorting the length of the air column. These variables allow the player to change the pitch and tone of the instruments.

Which is different from percussion, where you hit the instrument, like how you hit a drum with a stick. One funny example is the piano. You'd think it was a string instrument, because it has strings in it, but it's a percussion instrument because the strings are hit with little hammers. Also, xylophones are percussion instruments. Most percussion instruments are played by striking it to produced a sound.

One of the weirdest instruments I know of is called the "glass harmonica." It was invented by Benjamin Franklin . It's a bunch of glasses that make a singing sound. I don't know what orchestra family that would fit under. You don't strike it, you don't play it with a bow, and there's no reeds. I wonder where a singer would go, too. I think there's one more family of instruments. There are four, and we have talked about three in this essay.