Stringed Instruments

Guitars, violins, violas, cellos... all examples of stringed instruments. There are many different ways to play them, but for the sake of this blog post I'm going to focus on plucking. Plucking is when whoever is playing the instrument uses their finger to pull up the string and let it go. I believe this is more commonly seen with guitars (I play violin and it doesn't happen to frequently in the pieces I play). All of these instruments have strings that are fixed on each end. When a string is plucked, the string vibrates at a given frequency. The vibration gives off a sound. As you place fingers down on the finger board, you change the length of the string. This will change the frequency (see the equation attached below). As the length changes (represented as lambda) the frequency will change producing different pitches.