Facts About The Guitar

For the first half of this year I have been writing posts about the string family of musical instruments. I have so far concentrated on the most recognisable instruments of that orchestral family and you can read my posts by clicking here:

Facts about Families of Musical Instruments

Facts About The Violin

Facts About The Cello

Facts About The Viola

Facts About The Double Bass

This post will look at the guitar. Not necessarily an instrument that you would immediately think about if you were asked to name the instruments in the string family, but it is an instrument that has strings, and it is played by strumming or picking at the strings, so it is definitely part of it.

What is the guitar and how do you play it?

• Technically a chordophone, the guitar is a member of the string family of instruments. This family is called the string family because they are all played by either plucking, strumming or running a bow along a number of strings.
• A person who plays the guitar is called a guitar player, or a guitarist.
• The guitar is not traditionally a member of the orchestra, but there are pieces composed for the guitar as a soloist with an orchestra, or featuring a guitar as part of the ensemble.
• There are many different types of guitar, but the 3 most common are the classical guitar (which will usually have nylon strings), the steel-string acoustic guitar and the electric guitar. This post is generally referring to these 3 main types of guitar. There will be other guitars that don’t necessarily have all of the features discussed here, but the guitars you are most likely to come across probably will.
• The guitar has 6 strings tuned to the notes (going from the lowest string to the highest) E, A, D, G, B and E.
• The strings on the guitar run from the headstock at the very top of the instrument, to just below a bridge located towards the bottom of the guitar. The strings are wound around pegs that go through the headstock, and these pegs will be turned to tune the instrument.
• The material used for guitar strings will depend on what sort of sound you want to achieve with your guitar. Strings can be made from various materials including nylon, phosphor bronze, nickel bronze or steel & nickel.
• The body of the guitar is made out of wood. Some commonly used woods for the guitar include mahogany, ash, maple, walnut and holly. Some electric guitar makers use exotic tonewoods like Koa, rosewood, padouk and redwood within the building of their guitars. The reason that different types of wood are used is that wood from different trees produce resonances at different frequencies – and as you know if you have read these posts before, musical instruments work by making sound vibrate along or against or with different materials. So these different woods will produce a different tone or sound quality. Some electric guitars will not actually be made with a wooden body at all. Instead materials like high grade aluminium or carbon fibre might be used.
• An acoustic guitar will have a hollow body with a hole just below the end of the fret board, to let the sound vibrations resonate through the instrument and escape when you are playing.
• Electric guitars work slightly differently. They have what is called pickups built into their body. These pickups convert the vibrations produced by the guitar strings into an electrical signal which is sent to an amplifier. It is the amplifier that converts the signal into a sound and plays it. So electric guitars do not need the hole in their body, nor the hollow body that their acoustic counterparts need.
• All guitars have a fret board between the main body of the instrument and its headstock. There are frets marked out along the length of the fret board. These frets mark out roughly where to put the fingers on your non dominant hand to change the pitch you are playing. In the same way as other string instruments work, the guitarist can play an open string, where they do not put their fingers down on that string at all, or by pressing down on the string. Pressing down on the string will shorten the string, and as the string is shorter it will produce a higher pitched note than the open string.
• To play the guitar you will need to place it with the curve on one side of the guitar lying on your upper leg with the back of the instrument facing into your body. Your non-dominant hand will be at the top of the instrument, in fact the fretboard will rest on your hand. Use your non-dominant hand to press down on the fret board to change the pitch of the notes you are producing. Your dominant hand will either pluck at individual strings or strum along all of the strings/some of the strings. A guitarist might use a small almost triangular shaped piece of plastic (they are generally made out of plastic) called a guitar pick to help with picking or strumming the guitar.
• Sometimes a player will tap on the body of their guitar to produce a percussive sound.

History of the guitar

• It is thought that the classical guitar may have originated from ancient Egypt, and non fact there is a picture of an instrument that is very similar to the guitar that is around 3,000 years old. So the guitar has been around for a very long time!
• A little later on (I use the term “little” very loosely here!), in around the early fifteenth century a string instrument called the vihuela appeared in Spain. By the 19th century, a six double stringed version of this instrument, often referred to as the 19th century guitar, had become popular all over Europe.
• These early guitars would often vary in size and shaper depending on the guitar maker, or luthier, who made them. And the number of strings, or double strings on the instrument would vary. At some point 6 single strings, tuned as modern guitar strings are tuned, replaced the differing number of single or double strings
• Later on in the 19th century a Spanish luthier called Antonio de Torres created the first of our modern guitars. To make this instrument, he made the strings and body of the guitar longer, and the body of the instrument wider. This made the instrument much louder than its earlier ancestors.
• Three of the strings of this early classical guitar would be made out of catgut (made from the dried, twisted guts of sheep or horses), and three of the strings would be made out of metal-spun silk.
• guitars shaped like lyres were very popular in the drawing rooms of 19th century houses, and it remained an instrument played mainly by amateurs for a long time.
• It was a Spanish guitarist Fransisco Tárrego who transcribed various works by Baroque composer Bach and Classical composer Mozart for the guitar, and made these popular as possible concert repertoire.
• Composers started to write music for the guitar, including composers like Pierre Berlioz and Manuel de Falla.
• The guitar was a popular part of the jazz and folk music scene and of course, was a huge part of the development of rock and popular music. If you were to think back to the earliest rock and popular music bands or songs, you would probably find it very difficult to think of a song that did not feature the guitar.

Famous guitar players

Sometimes writing this section I can find a number of people who are famous for playing that particular instrument, and very often I find the names almost exclusively of classical (with a small ‘c’ so using it as a catch all term for all music written before about 1950) musicians. Not so much with the guitar, as it has been an absolute main stay of bands, especially rock and pop bands, for the past 70 years or so.

• Starting with the man in the video immediately above, famous guitarists include Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Prince, Tony Iommi, Elizabeth Cotten, Carlos Santana, BB King, Prince, Joni Mitchell, Xuefi Yang, Andrés Segovia, Ana Vidović, Julian Bream, and many, many more. This list just scratches the surface.
• There are also a number of people famous for other reasons who also happen to play guitar. These people include actors Ryan Gosling, Johnny Depp, Keanu Reeves, Hugh Laurie, Jack Black, Zooey Deschanel and Samuel L Jackson; Croatian Football Manager Slavan Bilić; US Politicians Benjamin Franklin, John Kerry and UK former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Guitar World Records

• The World Record for the longest marathon of playing guitar was set in June 2011 by David Browne playing guitar at the Temple Bar Pub in Dublin, Ireland for a staggering 114 hours, 6 minutes and 30 seconds.
• The world’s largest, playable guitar measures 16.75m (59ft 11in) long, 7.57m (24ft 10in) wide and 2.67m (8ft 9in) deep. The Guinness World Record for building this instrument is held by Paolo Pimental in Porto, Portugal and dates back to January 2001.
• Aaron Shum from Hong Kong holds the Guinness World Record for the most expensive guitar. The guitar, known as the ‘Eden of Coronet’ is made with 11,441 pieces of diamond and 18k white gold. This guitar was valued at $2,000,000 (£1,352530 or €1,897,410) in March 2015.

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