Remarks to Slack Rock Band in a Few Easy Steps
whackywhoop
I'm afraid that's a personal idiosyncrasy!
It's supposed to represent the sound of the wha-wha pedal
quickly played foot-down foot-up.
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whammy bar
This is another name for the tremolo bar, I'm not
sure about the detail but I guess it's a hardrock
electric guitar player idiosyncrasy (not always mine ;-).
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tremolo bar
That's the standard name for a whammy bar! Hem, all right, that's a device you find on electric guitars joined to the "chevalet", but let's quote the "Rock guitar secrets book" a book of Peter Fischer, page 164: (here's a link to buy the book, hoping I'll be forgiven for quoting a few lines that are not in the sample pages!)
Welcome to the whammy bar!
As with string bending and two hand tapping, the myriad applications of the tremolo arm are techniques which are the exclusive territory of electric guitarists. And there are as many names for this device as there are sounds that you can make with it: whammy bar, wang bar, twang bar, vibrato arm, tremolo arm (or even, try this, in Germany: Wimmerhaken, Wibbel), to mention a few. And then of course there's the eternal dlscussion about the terms tremolo and vibrato which guitarists have been having since the beginning of time (that is, sometime in the 1950's).
Here's The big answer to these big questions: in principle, tremolo and vibrato are two different effects. Tremolo, an effect from the 60s, involves adjustable fluctuations in volume, whereas vibrato is a fluctuation in pitch. Therefore a case could be made for vibrato being thee proper term. BUT, when Leo Fender, the inventor of the spring tremolo system, registered the patent for this device on April 10th, 1956, he named it "synchronized tremolo". So from a legal standpoint this is actually the correct name. For many years this tremolo was the only available, more or less stable system (as far as keeping in tune). Used by artists like Hank Marvin (Shadows), Jeff Beck and of course Jimi Hendrix it shaped sound and syle of the times.
Eddie van Halen's radical application of the tremelo in the late 70's, however, increased the demand for a more stable design, which Floyd Rose then met with his invention of a locking clamp system for the strings, at both the nut and the bridge. Despite a number of alternative systems this design has done well on the market and is now standard equipment on most strat-model guitars.
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single-coiled mikes
A single-coil microphone, that's the root of many noises, including easy
feedbdack for dummies (and deaf), the opposite is
a Humbucker.
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Nashville 8-36
The Nashville strings were a brand of fine steel strings for guitar, pedal-steel, dobros and all the family. They had at one moment in the second part of the 70's a "very ultra-lite" set of strings that had a very soft and bright sound as well as being very easily played by soft fingers (read starters in bending a string while playing the other ones as a chord). They also, and logically, included a triple double-bind, they would suddenly break preferably just in the middle of your best ever unforgettable solo in the only gig you could get a crashtest for your band. Second bind they were twice as expensive as the most expensive competitor. Last but not least, they were easily played by soft fingers, too much easily so instead of giving you the ability to bend a note within a chord you went down to bend every chord you played if you were at some conscious level a little bit higher than a weedhead stuck in the middle of his stock.
This last "default" finally turned me into using medium to heavy tension sets of strings because when you want to play some hard blues or metal having all the rythm guitar part going like if played with a 'bottleneck' on a Ukulele, isn't that grand ;D)
Besides, even with a 12-58 set of strings I still STRESS that they will break at any interesting time, that reminds me I'd never thought about telling it to the people around me saying I'm sometimes a bit nervous and all this time I believed it was a question of balance and glycemia :D)
I suppose that 8-36 and 12-58 still remains a mystery for non stringies?
These numbers are "tension/Size" numbers.
The strength to apply in a finger to bend a string (and as you need to bend the strings of a musical strings instrument to produce a tuned and toned sound [or you're just playing a new version of stringed musical-box] that is an important factor. The bigger the string the heavier the tension (weight to apply to stretch it), also the heavier the tension and the better the sound harmonics, intonation and many other things that'd need a separate page just to introduce the idea but I suddenly remember this is supposed to be an extension to a document about another part of the mind !-)
People interested in going further may start with the (commercial)
document
from D'Addario.
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