Types of Guitars Acoustic Electric Guitars Electric Guitars Classical Guitars Hollow Body Guitars Steel Guitars

Guitar ... Acoustic guitars (and similar instruments) with hollow bodies have been in use for over a thousand years... Guitars are recognized as a primary instrument in genres such as blues, bluegrass, country, flamenco, jazz, jota, mariachi, metal, reggae, rock, soul, and many forms of pop... For this reason guitars are distantly related to modern instruments from these regions, including the tanbur, the setar, and the sitar...

Acoustic Bass Guitar ... Ball's aim was to provide bass guitarists with a more acoustic-sounding instrument that would match better with the sound of acoustic guitars... Ball stated that ".if there were electric bass guitars to go with electric guitars then you ought to have acoustic basses to go with acoustic guitars." Ball notes that ".the closest thing to an acoustic bass was the Mexican guitarron.in mariachi bands, so I bought one down in Tijuana and tinkered with it."...

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...

Pickguard ... As well as serving a practical purpose, the pickguard may also be used for decoration and is often made in a contrasting color to that of the guitar body (popular variants are white pickguards on darker guitars and black pickguards on lighter guitars)... Expensive guitars may have luxury pickguards made from exotic woods, furs, skins, gems, precious metals, Mother of Pearl and abalone pearl... Acoustic and classical guitars Aggressive strumming with a pick can easily damage the polished surface of the guitar's soundboard...

Russian Guitar ... The invention of the Russian guitar is attributed to Andrei Sychra, who also wrote a method for the instrument, as well as over one thousand compositions, seventy-five of which were republished in the 1840s by Stellovsky, and then again in the 1880s by Gutheil. Some of these were published yet again in the Soviet Union in 1926...

3rd Bridge ... Third bridge instruments can be custom-made by experimental luthiers (as with guitars designed and played by Hans Reichel); modified from a non-third bridge instrument (as with conventional guitars modified with a pencil or screwdriver under the strings); or may take advantage of design quirks of factory-built instruments (as with the Fender Jazzmaster, which has strings that continue from the "standard" bridge to the tremolo piece)...

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...

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)...

Acoustic Guitar ... Magnetic pickups are generally mounted in the sound hole of the acoustic guitar and are very similar to those found in electric guitars...

Flamenco Guitar ... Originally, all guitars were made with wooden tuning pegs, that pass straight through the head stock, similar to those found on a lute, a violin or oud, as opposed to the modern classical-style guitars' geared tuning mechanisms...

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

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)...

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...

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...

Twelve-string Guitar ... The tension placed on the instrument by the strings is high, and because of this, 12 string guitars have a reputation for warping after a few years of use... Some twelve-string guitars have non-traditional structural supports to prevent or postpone such a fate, at the expense of appearance and tone... Until the invention of the truss rod in 1921, twelve-string guitars were nearly universally tuned lower than the traditional EADGBe, to reduce the stresses on the instrument...

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...