Guitar

• 1. Introduction

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  The guitar appears four times in the Bible, hidden in plain sight. The Greek word kithara turns up in passages from First Corinthians and Revelation, almost always translated into English as harp. That word traveled a long road. It passed from Ancient Greek into Latin as cithara, into Andalusian Arabic, then into the Spanish guitarra, and finally into English, German, and French. The instrument carrying that name has never sat still. It has been fretted and fretless, four strings and eighteen, strummed flat against the body and laid sideways across the knees. A 3,300-year-old stone carving shows a Hittite bard playing a stringed instrument, the oldest known image of its kind. So where did the modern six-string actually come from? Why does standard tuning hide one odd interval among its fourths? And how did a hollow wooden box become loud enough to power rock music? The answers live in wood, wire, and a few stubborn inventors.

• 2. Lost Origins

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  The origins of the modern guitar are not known. Before electric instruments and synthetic materials arrived, a guitar meant something specific: a long, fretted neck, a flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, usually with incurved sides. Clay plaques from Babylonia show people holding a lute-like instrument that resembles the guitar. Two instruments are commonly named as influential predecessors: the four-string oud and its precursor, the European lute. The Moors brought the oud to Iberia in the 8th century. Many scholars push back on the easy story. They consider the lute a separate line of development that did not meaningfully shape the guitar at all. By 1200, Spain used two instruments both called guitars. The guitarra morisca had a rounded back, a wide fingerboard, and several sound holes. The guitarra latina had a single sound hole and a narrower neck. By the 14th century the qualifiers moresca and latina had been dropped, and people simply said guitars.

• 3. The Spanish Tradition

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  The Spanish vihuela, called the viola da mano in Italian, is widely considered the single most important influence on the baroque guitar. A 15th and 16th century instrument, it usually had six courses, lute-like tuning in fourths, and a guitar-like body, though early pictures show a sharply cut waist. It was larger than the four-course guitars of its day. Its popularity in Spain and Italy proved short, and the last published music for it appeared in 1576. The five-course baroque guitar took its place. Documented in Spain from the middle of the 16th century, it thrived in Spain, Italy, and France into the mid-18th century. Credit for the five-course guitar sparked real controversy. Lope de Vega's Dorotea gives it to the poet and musician Vicente Espinel, a claim Nicolas Doizi de Velasco repeated in 1640. Others objected: Espinel's birth year of 1550 made it impossible for him to have started the tradition. Gaspar Sanz later wrote that nations like Italy and France added to the Spanish guitar, recreating their own versions. Around 1850, Spanish makers settled the modern form. Manuel de Soto y Solares contributed, but Antonio Torres Jurado mattered most. He enlarged the body, changed its proportions, and invented the fan-braced pattern that improved volume, tone, and projection. His design has stayed essentially unchanged since.

• 4. A Family Of Bodies

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  Classical guitars, also called Spanish guitars, are strung with nylon, plucked with the fingers, and played seated. Their wide, flat necks make scales, arpeggios, and certain chord forms easier with less string interference. Flamenco guitars share the construction but carry a more percussive tone. In Portugal, the instrument is tied to fado music, traditionally strung with 12 steel strings, and there the word viola means the guitar. In Brazil it is called viola or violao, and choro musicians add a seventh string for bass support. Mexico's mariachi bands run from the small requinto to the guitarron, a guitar larger than a cello tuned in the bass register. In the 1840s, German-American luthiers developed the robust X-bracing of the flat-top guitar, and Christian Friedrich Martin is the best known of them. That strength let later instruments hold the extra tension of steel strings, which produce a brighter, louder tone. Martin introduced larger tops to create more volume, and the dreadnought became the most commonly available type. Archtop guitars carve the top, and often the back, from a solid billet into a curved shape. This violin-like construction is usually credited to the American Orville Gibson. Lloyd Loar of the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Mfg. Co introduced the F-shaped hole now linked with archtops, and jazz and country musicians adopted them at once.

• 5. Loud By Other Means

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  John Dopyera, a Slovak-American who lived from 1893 to 1988, invented all three principal types of resonator guitar for the National and Dobro companies. Dobro is short for Dopyera Brothers. The resonator guitar produces its sound through one or more aluminum cones mounted in the middle of the top, making its physical principle similar to a loudspeaker. The original purpose was simple: a very loud sound. Electric amplification has largely superseded that role, yet players keep the resonator for its distinctive tone. The steel guitar took a different path to a singing voice. It uses no frets at all. A polished steel bar is pressed lightly against plucked strings and slid smoothly over every pitch between notes, emulating the human voice with deep vibrato. The bar itself is called a steel, and it gives the instrument its name. Played horizontally across the knees, this is the Hawaiian style. The electric guitar arrived through George Beauchamp, who invented the first successful magnetic pickup. It was built into the 1931 Ro-Pat-In Frying Pan lap steel; that company later became Rickenbacker. After World War II, Gibson popularized the fully solid-body electric in collaboration with Les Paul, and Leo Fender of Fender Music did so independently. Solid bodies began dominating the market through the 1960s and 1970s, partly because they resist unwanted acoustic feedback. The first electric guitars had been patented back in 1937.

• 6. Inside The Neck

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  The truss rod is a thin, strong metal rod running along the inside of the neck. It corrects changes in the neck's curvature from aging timbers, shifting humidity, or string tension. Turning it clockwise straightens the neck or bows it backward; turning it counter-clockwise lets string tension pull a forward bow. The luthier Irving Sloane noted in his book Steel-String Guitar Construction that truss rods remedy concave bowing but cannot fix a back bow or a twisted neck. Classical guitars skip the truss rod entirely, since nylon strings exert lower force, though their necks often carry a reinforcing strip of harder wood. Frets sit at exact points dividing the scale length by a mathematical formula. Standard classical guitars have 19 frets and electric guitars between 21 and 24, though some reach 27. The ratio between two consecutive frets is the twelfth root of two, and luthiers approximate fret positions using the constant 17.817. The twelfth fret divides the scale length exactly in half. Inlays mark the 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 12th frets to guide the player, made of anything from plastic dots to mother of pearl, abalone, or ivory. High-end classical guitars rarely bother with fretboard inlays, since a well-trained player is expected to know the instrument. In 1982, Uli Jon Roth developed the Sky Guitar, with a vastly extended number of frets, the first to reach the upper registers of the violin.

• 7. The Logic Of Tuning

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  Standard tuning hides one irregularity, and the whole layout depends on it. By the 16th century, Western culture had adopted the tuning ADGBE, and a lower E was later added at the bottom as a sixth string. The result runs from a low E to a high E across a two-octave range: EADGBE. It is a series of ascending fourths with a single major third between the second and third strings. The fourths let four fingers cover four frets up a scale before moving to the next string. If every interval were a perfect fourth, the high string would land on a dissonant F sitting a half-step from the low E. The lone major third has a cost. Chords cannot simply slide around the fretboard, which forces four separate chord-shapes for the major chords, with roots on the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth strings. Alternatives answer this in different ways. Open tunings make the open strings sound a chord, so barring one fret plays others, a favorite for slide and bottleneck guitars; Ry Cooder plays slide with open tunings. Regular tunings give equal intervals between strings, so chords move diagonally or even vertically. Jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan uses the all-fourths tuning EADGCF. Robert Fripp and his Guitar Craft students use a new standard tuning, CGDAE with a high G, built on the lowest five strings of all-fifths tuning. Drop tunings lower the lowest string; dropping it a whole tone gives drop-D, with open notes DADGBE and a deep bass D.

• 8. Hands And Accessories

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  Jimi Hendrix played a right-handed guitar strung in reverse, swapping the treble and bass strings. The trick carried a flaw. It reversed the orientation of the saddle, the strip on top of the bridge where the strings rest. That saddle is normally slanted so the bass strings run slightly longer than the treble strings, a difference required by their greater thickness to keep intonation correct. Reversing the strings reversed the saddle and hurt the intonation. Accessories shape playing in quieter ways. A capo, short for capotasto, clips onto the fretboard to raise the pitch of the open strings, letting players change keys without changing chord shapes. Its convenience earned it pejorative names like cheaters and the hillbilly crutch, yet classical performers use capos to match the pitch of historical instruments like the Renaissance lute. The pick, or plectrum, ranges from thin strummers between 0.2 and 0.5 mm to thick lead picks between 0.7 and 1.5 mm or more. Tortoise shell was the early favorite, but the practice was banned as tortoises and turtles became endangered, leaving pre-ban picks coveted and valuable. Players improvise too. Billy Gibbons gets his distinctive sound from a quarter or a peso. Brian May uses a sixpence coin, and the session musician David Persons cut old credit cards to size as plectrums. From a Hittite carving to a coin held against six wires, the instrument keeps finding new hands.