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i wonder what the next instrument will be

the 20th century brought us… the electric guitar, the bass guitar, and the drumkit, in the process inventing… the band? not to mention the synthesizer.

@hikari it's really interesting if you look into how the drumkit developed ex nihilo. Apparently it came out of New Orleans marching bands

@mcc i tweeted this thread because i discovered to my horror that the bass guitar as a concept is basically always electric, for amplification reasons, and so the “electric bass guitar” is better known as the “bass guitar”, because it replaced the… contrabass. and in that moment i realised all the “standard” instruments that aren't the piano are very “new”

@mcc the drumkit is a weird one because it is an instrument but technically it's as old as drums itself in some sense???

@hikari the modern idiom of it is pretty recent and took a good 30 years of iteration to hit it's modern form

@mcc where are the start and end of those 30 years, roughly speaking?

@hikari I will send you a video later it is interesting

@mcc @hikari Also the electronic organ is a "new" (20th century) instrument! (Technically the very earliest electric organs were at the very end of the 19th century, but they didn't really evolve into the modern thing until the 1930s)

@adrienne @mcc oh yes i think there's a few keyboard-based instruments i'm glossing over here. another is the electric piano, but i suppose that's just a different piano

@hikari @mcc The modern piano only dates to the 1860s, for that matter! (It's an evolution from the older pianoforte, but it really is a technically different critter!)

@adrienne @hikari the technology behind flywheel organs is actually kinda wild