Guitar

A Di Giorgio classic guitar
String instrument
Classification	String instrument (plucked, nylon-stringed guitars usually played with fingerpicking, and steel-, etc. usually with a pick.)
Hornbostel-Sachs Classification	321.322 (Composite chordophone)
Playing range
(a regularly tuned guitar)
Related instruments
Bowed and plucked string instruments

The guitar is a musical instrument with ancient roots that is used in a wide variety of musical styles. It typically has six strings, but four, seven, eight, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen and eighteen string guitars also exist.

Guitars are recognized as one of the primary instruments in jazz, blues, country, flamenco, mariachi, rock music, and many forms of pop. They can also be a solo classical instrument. Guitars may be played acoustically, where the tone is produced by vibration of the strings and modulated by the hollow body, or they may rely on an amplifier that can electronically manipulate tone. Such electric guitars were introduced in the 1930s and continue to have a profound influence on popular culture.

Traditionally guitars have usually been constructed of combinations of various woods and strung with animal gut, or more recently, with either nylon or steel strings. Guitars are made and repaired by luthiers. There are many brands of guitars, but some commonly known brands are PRS, Gibson, Dean, Gretsch, Ibanez, Martin, Jackson, Schecter, and Fender.

History

Before the development of the electric guitar and the use of synthetic materials, a guitar was defined as being an instrument having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides".[1] Instruments similar to the guitar have been popular for at least 5,000 years. While today's classical guitar first appeared in Spain, it was itself a product of the long and complex history that saw a number of related guitar types developed and used across Europe.[2] The roots of the guitar can be traced back thousands of years to an Indo-European origin in instruments, then known in central Asia and India. For this reason the guitar itself is distantly related to instruments such as the tanbur and setar, and the Indian sitar. The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument displaying all the essential features of a guitar being played is a 3,300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.[3] The modern word, guitar, was adopted into English from Spanish guitarra (German Gitarre, French Guitare),[4] loaned from the medieval Andalusian Arabic qitara[5], itself derived from the Latin cithara, which in turn came from the earlier Greek word kithara,[6] which is descended from the Old Persian word sihtar.[7]

The modern guitar is descended from the Roman cithara brought by the Romans to Hispania around 40 AD, and further adapted and developed with the arrival of the four-string oud, brought by the Moors after their conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the 8th century.[8] Elsewhere in Europe, the indigenous six-string Scandinavian lut (lute), had gained in popularity in areas of Viking incursions across the continent. Often depicted in carvings c. 800 AD, the Norse hero Gunther (also known as Gunnar), played a lute with his toes as he lay dying in a snake-pit, in the legend of Siegfried.[9] By 1200 AD, the four string "guitar" had evolved into two types: the guitarra morisca (Moorish guitar) which had a rounded back, wide fingerboard and several soundholes, and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) which resembled the modern guitar with one soundhole and a narrower neck.[10]

The Spanish vihuela or "viola da mano", a guitar-like instrument of the 15th and 16th centuries is, due to its similarities, is often considered an important influence in the development of the modern guitar. It had lute-style tuning and a guitar-like body. Its construction had as much in common with the modern guitar as with its contemporary four-course renaissance guitar. The vihuela enjoyed only a short period of popularity; the last surviving publication of music for the instrument appeared in 1576. It is not clear whether it represented a transitional form or was simply a design that combined features of the Arabic oud and the European lute. In favor of the latter view, the reshaping of the vihuela into a guitar-like form can be seen as a strategy of differentiating the European lute visually from the Moorish oud. Meanwhile, the five string renassance guitar and the baroque guitar enjoyed popularity, especially in Italy and France, and indeed, much of Europe from the 15th to the 18th centuries.

The Vinaccia family of luthiers is known for developing the mandolin, and may have built the oldest surviving six string guitar. Gaetano Vinaccia (1759 – after 1831)[11] has his signature on the label of a guitar built in Naples, Italy for six strings with the date of 1779.[12][13] This guitar has been examined and does not show tell-tale signs of modifications from a double-course guitar although fakes are known to exist of guitars and identifying labels from that period.

The dimensions of the modern classical guitar (also known as the Spanish guitar) were established by Antonio Torres Jurado (1817-1892), working in Seville in the 1850s. Torres and Louis Panormo of London (active 1820s-1840s) were both responsible for demonstrating the superiority of fan strutting over transverse table bracing.[14]

Types of guitar

Guitars can be divided into two broad categories, acoustic and electric:

Acoustic guitars

An acoustic guitar is one not dependent on an external device to be heard but uses a soundboard which is a wooden piece mounted on the front of the guitar's body. The acoustic guitar is quieter than other instruments commonly found in bands and orchestras so when playing within such groups it is often externally amplified. Many acoustic guitars available today feature a variety of pickups which enable the player to amplify and modify the raw guitar sound.

There are several notable subcategories within the acoustic guitar group: classical and flamenco guitars; steel string guitars, which include the flat top or "folk" guitar; twelve string guitars and the arch top guitar. The acoustic guitar group also includes unamplified guitars designed to play in different registers such as the acoustic bass guitar which has a similar tuning to that of the electric bass guitar.

Renaissance and Baroque guitars

These are the gracile ancestors of the modern classical guitar. They are substantially smaller and more delicate than the classical guitar, and generate a much quieter sound. The strings are paired in courses as in a modern 12 string guitar, but they only have four or five courses of strings rather than six. They were more often used as rhythm instruments in ensembles than as solo instruments, and can often be seen in that role in early music performances. (Gaspar Sanz' Instrucción de Música sobre la Guitarra Española of 1674 constitutes the majority of the surviving solo corpus for the era.) Renaissance and Baroque guitars are easily distinguished because the Renaissance guitar is very plain and the Baroque guitar is very ornate, with ivory or wood inlays all over the neck and body, and a paper-cutout inverted "wedding cake" inside the hole.

Classical guitars

These are typically strung with nylon strings, played in a seated position and are used to play a diversity of musical styles including classical music. The classical guitar's wide, flat neck allows the musician to play scales, arpeggios and certain chord forms more easily and with less adjacent string interference than on other styles of guitar. Flamenco guitars are very similar in construction, but are associated with a more percussive tone. In Mexico, the popular mariachi band includes a range of guitars, from the tiny requinto to the guitarron, a guitar larger than a cello, which is tuned in the bass register. In Colombia, the traditional quartet includes a range of instruments too, from the small bandola (sometimes known as the Deleuze-Guattari, for use when traveling or in confined rooms or spaces), to the slightly larger tiple, to the full sized classical guitar. The requinto also appears in other Latin-American countries as a complementary member of the guitar family, with its smaller size and scale, permitting more projection for the playing of single-lined melodies. Modern dimensions of the classical instrument were established by Antonio Torres Jurado (1817-1892). Classical guitars are sometimes referred to as classic guitars. In recent years, the series of guitars used by the Niibori Guitar orchestra have gained some currency, namely:

• Sopranino guitar (an octave and a fifth higher than normal); sometimes known as the piccolo guitar
• Soprano guitar (an octave higher than normal)
• Alto guitar (a 5th higher than normal)
• Prime (ordinary classical) guitar
• Niibori bass guitar (a 4th lower than normal); Niibori simply calls this the "bass guitar", but this assigns a different meaning to the term than other parts of the community use, as his is only a 4th lower, and has 6 strings
• Contrabass guitar (an octave lower than normal)

The modern Ten-string guitar

The Modern/Yepes 10-string guitar (a classical guitar) adds four strings (resonators) tuned in such a way that they (along with the other three bass strings) can resonate in unison with any of the 12 chromatic notes that can occur on the higher strings; the idea behind this being an attempt at enhancing and balancing sonority.

• The Guitar Family Tree
• Instruments In Depth: The Guitar An online feature from Bloomingdale School of Music (October, 2007)
• Stalking the Oldest Six-String Guitar
• Guitar physics
• International Guitar Research Archive
• The first rock guitars
• allGuitarists.com – Web forum and online magazine about guitar.
• Guitar Albums Collection - World of Instrumental Music
• http://www.guitar-insight.com
• - Guitar Strap Sample Images
• Fretbase - An Online Guitar Encyclopedia
• The Guitar, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring many historic guitars from the Museum's collection

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