Re: Harmonic guitar

[Lucas Bleicher <lbleicher@yahoo.com>]

>This morning I was listening to Johnny Ramone (one of
my faves).  I 
was 
>reminded that 'harmonic' has been used to describe
his playing style 
as 
>well.   In parcicular the fast, sustained chords that
blend into each 
>other.

>Could someone with a bit more musical experience than
I (I have zero)
>explain the concept of harmonics?

In fact the meaning of harmonics here is not harmonic
intervals, but "natural" and "artificial" harmonics,
which is a guitar effect produced when you play a note
and then gently touch the string a positon 5, 7 or 12
frets (these are the most easy to produce) after the
note (natural harmonic) or when you hit the string in
a way that the pick srike the note and immediately
after this the thumb hit it (artificial harmonic). In
both cases, the result is a very high-pitched note,
which can even two octaves higher than the original
note depending on the way you do it. Although I think
there were guitarists which did that before him, Eddie
Van Halen made this technique very common and more
"scientific" (most people did guitar harmonics by
choosing the correct place to touch the string by
trial and error, and I've read an interview some time
ago where VH was talking about the way he discovered
how to produce guitar harmonics with a bit of
certainty on the result).

It was very common to hear some of those
light-speed-guitarists of the 80's do an harmonic
producing a very high-pitched note and then bend the 
Floyd Rose tremolo (invented that era, I think) making
the note go extremely down.

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