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Chinese Music
A Quick Guide to Chinese Music and Instruments
Chinese music has many forms, and instruments used during performances can appear quite strange looking to the uninitiated. This Quick Guide is intended as a simple introduction to those who may be curious about Contemporary and/or Traditional Chinese musical forms

We will support this with some music downloads and a Chinese MP3 Player, all of which we are assured comply with International Property Rights and protect the artists concerned

Shortcuts:


Free Popular Music Downloads
Rock and Pop music listened to in China and including many foremost artist's from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Pages link to Artists own pages with bio's, pictures and free / clean music downloads (mainly video).

Chinese Traditional Instruments - with downloads
Desciptions and free / clean links to many downloads featuring weird looking intruments and new sounds for Western ears. You may not like all of these, or know some quite well. To broaden your musical horizons begin with:
* Erhu is also known as the Chinesre violin, and a melancholy instrument used to great effect in Rock, Blues, Jazz and Folk musice.
* Xun is a Stone Age instrument played superbly on a modern dance track - listing Track 1
* This page also features: 10 Classic Songs, Banhu, Guqin, Guzheng, Pipa, and Suona at present.

Chinese Traditional Instruments - older pages without media downloads
This original section is slowly being replaced by the one above. It lists over 80 Chinese instruments at present, with another 500 still to add! However, while our research and resources continues to grow, we have stopped adding new content and instead will use the section above, which is far more dynamic and informative.

Obviously this is a lot of work and it will take us about 1-month to transfer everything to the new format. This is scheduled for Spring 2011.
 
Chinese Instruments
 
China has about 100 native musical instruments, ranging from stone drums of antiquity, through to modern orchestral stringed instruments. For beginners, it is best to begin with the most popular in contemporary culture, these being: the Chinese Bow (ErHu and four others of differing pitch), Chinese lute (Pipa), and the Chinese horizontal Harp thingymagig called a Zheng
 
We have pictures with full descriptions for the most common instruments here
Chinese Musical Instruments
 
Related Websites
 
History of Chinese Music

The history of Chinese music
This excellent website charts the course of Chinese music over the last 7,000 years, right up to the modern day.
The modern blog format allows you to chat with Jack Smith and others who are interested in Chinese music and associated instruments here.

 
This information is as supplied by ourselves, and ably supported by our friends:

Wikipedia   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_traditional_Chinese_musical_instruments
and
Steve's Blog at idmation   http://idmation.com/china/

Disclaimer:
As far as we are aware, all information and downloads are either reproduced here with expressed permission, or obtained from reliable free resources, and comply with International Property Rights.

Please contact us 'Now' if you think there is a problem, and we will rectify the situation immediately
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