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 Home > Learning Center > Guitars

Guitars

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Guitars are one of the oldest musical instruments. They hail from the lute family, though they differ in specifics. A lute features a rounded back, while a guitar has a square back. This accounts for some of the difference in sound between the two. Though truth be told, only acoustic and classical guitars produce sound in a similar manner to the lute. An electric guitar produces the same string vibrations as the other instruments, but instead of amplifying those vibrations with the instrument’s body, it does so via an electrical connection to the amplifier.

Where to pick up on the history of the guitar depends on how interested you are in the subject, and how you define guitar. The stringed instruments from which the guitar is descended have been around for over five thousand years. The Greeks are responsible for developing the harp, but ancient Syria seems to have been the birth place of the full bodied stringed instrument.

The six stringed guitars make their first appearance in the late 18th century. They are the first guitars that feature all the commonly associated features of the modern instrument. These are six strings, a neck with a fret board and a hollow, wooden back that is square with the front. Today guitars are not limited to the six string variant. There are instruments with just about any amount of strings you can imagine including four, seven, eight, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and eighteen.

Tuning a six string guitar is actually relatively simple when compared to the tuning process for say, a harp or a piano. A guitar’s high string starts on the note high E, which is the E above middle C. In a traditional tune, the strings will be tuned from that note down to a lower E, creating a two octave range. This can be done with tuning by fifths. This tuning method takes advantage of the fact that when properly tuned, the 5th fret on any string should play the same note as the string above it plays when open. This rule is followed with a single exception, between the 2nd and 3rd strings it is the 4th fret that plays the same note.

Some guitarists prefer to lower the lowest string an additional note, this is known as a Drop-D. Another popular variant on tuning is straight tuning, which gets rid of the exception for 3rd string tuning and just tunes the entire guitar in 5ths. That technique can make some popular chords difficult to play, but there are other, more advanced chords that actually become easier with that tuning method.

A guitar’s neck is the portion that must be the most structurally sound. Many guitar necks are actually arched so that without the tension of the strings they would bow back. This is because the strings place a lot of strain on the neck. In fact, the most common breaking point, despite all the effort that goes into counter it, is the guitar’s neck.

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