On
string instrument
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.
Musicians play some ...
s, a stopped note is a
note
Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to:
Music and entertainment
* Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music
* ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian
* ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened versi ...
whose pitch has been altered from the pitch of the
open string by the player's left hand pressing (stopping) the string against the fingerboard.
Bowed strings
On bowed string instruments, a stopped note is a played
note
Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to:
Music and entertainment
* Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music
* ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian
* ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened versi ...
that is
fingered with the left hand, i.e. not an open string.
[Andrea Pejrolo, Rich DeRosa (2007). ''Acoustic and MIDI Orchestration for the Contemporary Composer'', p.99-100. .] This assists with
tone production, the addition of
vibrato
Vibrato (Italian language, Italian, from past participle of "wikt:vibrare, vibrare", to vibrate) is a musical effect consisting of a regular, pulsating change of pitch (music), pitch. It is used to add expression to vocal and instrumental music. ...
, and sometimes additional
volume
Volume is a measure of regions in three-dimensional space. It is often quantified numerically using SI derived units (such as the cubic metre and litre) or by various imperial or US customary units (such as the gallon, quart, cubic inch) ...
but creates difficulty in that bowed string instruments do not have
fret
A fret is any of the thin strips of material, usually metal wire, inserted laterally at specific positions along the neck or fretboard of a stringed instrument. Frets usually extend across the full width of the neck. On some historical inst ...
s, requiring
ear training
In music, ear training is the study and practice in which musicians learn various aural skills to detect and identify pitch (music), pitches, interval (music), intervals, melody (music), melody, chord (music), chords, rhythms, solfeges, and other ...
and accurate finger placement.
The lack of frets, as on the guitar fretboard, does allow greater variability in
intonation though a bowed string instrumentalist, such as a violinist, "when unaccompanied, does not play consistently in either the
tempered or the
natural scale, but tends on the whole to conform with the
Pythagorean scale"
The open notes of the highest three strings may be played as stopped notes on the lowest three strings, offering advantages and disadvantages:
s, the rapid alternation of two notes, are best between two stopped notes on one string, in which case it is limited to the interval of an
augmented fourth
Augment or augmentation may refer to:
Language
*Augment (Indo-European), a syllable added to the beginning of the word in certain Indo-European languages
* Augment (Bantu languages), a morpheme that is prefixed to the noun class prefix of nouns ...
, or between stopped notes on two adjacent strings:
[Cecil Forsyth (1982). ''Orchestration'', p.356. .]
Plucked strings
).
On plucked string instruments with
fret
A fret is any of the thin strips of material, usually metal wire, inserted laterally at specific positions along the neck or fretboard of a stringed instrument. Frets usually extend across the full width of the neck. On some historical inst ...
s, such as the guitar, the pitch of a stopped note is determined by the left hand pressing (stopping) the string at one of the frets.
Sources
{{Musical technique
String performance techniques