The guitar is the most popular musical instrument in the world. Today no live music concert is without it. It is as good in an orchestra, band, or musical group as it is in solitary exercises, where the musician can enjoy even playing alone with himself or herself.
In the broadest sense any guitar is a chordophone, the sound is produced by the vibrations of a string stretched between two points. Such products have been known since ancient times. They were already in the ancient Egyptian civilization and even earlier – in the agricultural Mediterranean cultures of the copper and bronze age. Guitar historians of musical instruments refer to the lute family, because it has not only a body, but also a fingerboard, on which the strings are clamped by the fingers.
History of the musical instrument
Forerunners of guitar are considered plucked instruments, which at that time didn’t have a neck: kifara and zither. They were played in Ancient Egypt and Greece and a little later in Rome. With the advent of the long narrow neck came the need for a solid resonator. It was originally made of hollow vessels and other three-dimensional objects such as turtle shells, dried pumpkin fruits or hollowed-out wooden sections of a trunk. The wooden body, composed of upper and lower decks and sides (shells) was invented in ancient China at the beginning of the first millennium AD.
From there this idea was carried over to the Arabian countries and embodied in the Moorish guitar and in the VIII-IX centuries it came to Europe.
The name origin
The guitar owes its name to the Latin language as a common name during the Middle Ages. The Greek word “cithara,” which few people in Europe could read anymore after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, was transliterated into Latin cithara as a result. Latin also underwent a change over time – the word had the form of quitaire, and in the Romano-Germanic languages it became known as guitar.
Spanish guitar
During the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the New Age the center of music development was Spain. In the times of Cordoba Caliphate Moorish guitar was spread there, and after the Reconquista the Spaniards modernized it giving it a shape close to the modern one. The instruments of the XV century had five paired strings, stretched by pins, placed on the long head.
At the end of the XVIII century there appeared a modern guitar: the guitar has six single strings, a convenient body with holes for a better holding, and also a round hole in the top soundboard.
Acoustic guitar
In the 19th century the musician and guitar maker Antonio Torres invented the guitar of modern design and proportions. Today it is called the classical guitar and is used in academic music as well as by amateur musicians for recreational purposes.
The acoustic guitar has come down to us almost unchanged. It consists of a solid body, which serves as a resonator, a neck, which is attached to the body with a special screw, and the head, on which the tuning knobs for string tension are located.
Acoustic guitar has 19 frets – metal ribs on the fingerboard, which allow you to produce notes at a certain interval. While the classical guitar has 12 fretted pads from the top plate to the beginning of the body, the later acoustic guitar has 14 fretted pads. The latter is sometimes equipped with a cut-out allowing to play high notes.
Electric guitar
When the electricity began its victorious march over the planet in the XXth century the musical instruments’ manufacturers couldn’t avoid the opportunity to strengthen the guitar strings sound with the help of technical devices. In 1936 the first “grandmother” of the electric guitar was created. It had an aluminum body and a pair of electromagnet pickups. Because of its round body shape, more like a banjo, and the material, it was nicknamed “frying pan”.
Due to the conversion of acoustic vibrations into electric and the action of amplifiers, electric guitar does not need a resonator – its body can be a variety of forms, although it is often made similar to the acoustic guitar.
Bass Guitar
This instrument is used to reproduce the low-frequency register when playing music. The bass guitar usually has 4 strings and a longer fingerboard. Acoustic versions are very rare, as low frequencies are heard much worse with the natural resonance of the body.
In the second half of XX century some bass virtuosos began to use fretless bass, which allowed to do without a fixed musical scale.