All About Acoustic Guitars

Musical Ensemble ... Other common groupings in classical music are the woodwind quintet, usually consisting of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn and the brass quintet, consisting of two trumpets, one french horn, a trombone and a tuba. Six or more instruments Classical chamber ensembles for more than six musicians are occasionally used, such as septets (seven musicians), octets (eight musicians), or nonets (nine musicians)...

Guitar Tunings ... Like many other stringed instruments, guitar tunings can be easily modified. When speaking of a tuning such as standard tuning, EADGBE refers to the pitches of the strings from lowest pitch (low E) to highest (high E)...

Gittern ... Up until 2002, there were only two known surviving medieval gitterns, one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see external links), the other in the Wartburg Castle Museum. A third was discovered in a medieval outhouse in Elbing, Poland...

Truss Rod ... It is desirable for a guitar neck to have a slight relief in order that reasonably low action is achieved in the high fretboard positions, while at the same time, the strings ring clearly in the low positions. Improved action in the high fret positions also allows for more accurate intonation, to be achieved with less compensation at the bridge...

Dobro ... The Dobro brand later also appeared on other instruments, notably electric lap-steel guitars and solid-body electric guitars and on other resonator instruments such as Safari resonator mandolins...

Extended-range Classical Guitar ... Paul Galbraith and Alexander Vynograd are two of the most notable 8 string players who use the extra high and low string tuning. Galbraith generally tunes (B) ADGBEA which puts standard 6 string guitar chord voicings and scale shapes within the neck and allows him to read lute tablature directly (a whole step higher)...

Selmer Guitar ... The scale, at 640 mm, and fretting of the early guitars was very similar to other contemporary guitars (including the Gibson and Martin guitar designs from which most modern acoustic guitar patterns ultimately derive), but with a wide fretboard more typical of a classical guitar... Many of these guitars, produced during 1932 and 1933, were sold to the UK market via Selmer's London showroom (which also distributed the guitar to regional dealers) and it was during this period that the guitars became known as "Maccaferris" to Britons... Innovations The original Maccaferri-Selmer was one of the earliest guitars with a metal-reinforced neck (or truss rod), a now ubiquitous feature in steel string guitars...

Vibrato Systems For Guitar ... The mechanical vibrato systems began as a device for more easily producing the vibrato effects that blues and jazz guitarists had long produced on arch top guitars by manipulating the tailpiece with their picking hand...

Guitarrón Mexicano ... The guitarrón mexicano (literally "Mexican large guitar" in Spanish, the suffix "-ón" denoting "large") or Mexican guitarron, is a very large, deep-bodied Mexican 6-string acoustic bass played traditionally in mariachi groups. Although obviously similar to the guitar, it is not a derivative of that instrument, but was independently developed from the sixteenth-century Spanish bajo de uña...

Headstock ... For example, various manufacturers and particular guitar models use: Guitars 4°: Guild 11°: Martin 12°: Bigsby, Yamaha SGV 13°: Peavey, Warmoth 14°: Gibson Firebird V and VII, Gibson X-plorer, some vintage Gibson guitars, Washburn, most budget Epiphone replicas of Gibson models 17°: Gibson ES-335, Gibson Les Paul, Gibson SG, Epiphone Casino Basses 10°: all Gibson basses 12°: Yamaha SBV 14°: most Epiphone replicas of Gibson models 24°: Kinal Luthiers of both styles frequently cite better sound, longer sustain and strings staying in tune longer as advantages of each style... Some guitars without machine heads (for example, ones equipped with Floyd Rose SpeedLoader) have a headstock for purely decorative reasons... Signature headstock outlines All major guitar brands have signature headstocks that make their guitars or guitar series easily recognizable...

Resonator Guitar ... Resonator guitars are of two styles: Square necked guitars designed to be played in steel guitar style... There are three main resonator designs: The "tricone" ("tri" in reference to the three metal cones/resonators) design of the first National resonator guitars... In 1927, Dopyera and Beauchamp formed the National String Instrument Corporation to manufacture resonator guitars under the brand name National...

Neck (music) ... Classical guitars almost never feature position markers, especially on the fretboard's face, whereas electric guitars usually do...

Archtop Guitar ... His 1898 patent for a mandolin, which was also applicable to guitars according to the specifications, was intended to enhance "power and quality of tone." Among the features of this instrument were a violin-style arched top and back, each carved from a single piece of wood, and thicker in the middle than at the sides; sides carved to shape from a single block of wood; and a lack of internal "braces, splices, blocks or bridges … which, if employed, would rob the instrument of much of its volume of tone." However, Gibson was not the first to apply violin design principles to the guitar... Merrill, for example, patented in 1896 a very modern looking instrument "of the guitar and mandolin type … with egg-shaped hoop or sides and a graduated convex back and top."The instrument featured a metal tailpiece and teardrop shaped "f-holes," and strongly resembled the archtop guitars of the 1930s...

Classical Guitar ... The term modern classical guitar is sometimes used to distinguish the classical guitar from older forms of guitar, which are in their broadest sense also called classical, or more descriptively: early guitars...

Nut (string Instrument) ... Variations Not all string instruments have nuts as described: Some guitars and mandolins, for example, have nuts that are just string spacers, with deep notches...

Harp Guitar ... Most readily identified are American harp guitars with either hollow arms, double necks or harp-like frames for supporting extra bass strings, and European bass guitars (or contraguitars)... Other harp guitars feature treble or mid-range floating strings, or various combinations of multiple floating string banks along with a standard guitar neck... Electric harp guitars While most players of harp guitars play on acoustic instruments, a few of them also work with electric instruments...