Guitar (Acoustic)

In modern parlance the word "guitar" usually connotes an electric guitar; the qualifier "acoustic" is necessary to indicate the original instrument. The acoustic guitar, distinguished from other lute-type instruments by its characteristic combination of flat-backed resonating chamber, fretted neck, and indented side walls, is of great antiquity; terminologically and perhaps historically it is related to the Greek kithara lyre. Repertory directly associated with the classical guitar began to appear early in the Renaissance era, although the modern instrument with six strings dates only from the late eighteenth century. The earliest six-string guitars seem to have been made in France or Italy, but soon it became associated above all with Spain, where to this day there flourishes a unique tradition of classical guitar music, marked by strong quasi-improvisatory elements and a variety of exotic influences. Spain is also the home of the fiery, gypsy-created guitar style known as flamenco. How did the guitar assume its preeminent position in the world of popular song? Certainly it is ideally suited to such roles in many ways: it is inexpensive, portable, easily learned at the basic level, and capable of producing both melody and rhythm. Its route into American musical consciousness took it through Hawaii, where it was introduced by Portuguese sailors in the nineteenth century and where it gave birth to an enormous craze for Hawaiian music whose scope in the early twentieth century is often underestimated today. The guitar was popular among both country and blues musicians, and probably the first musical figure to embody the image of a solitary, freewheeling musical creator making a living by accompanying his own songs with a guitar was the "Blue Yodeler" who most profoundly combined the two genres, Jimmie Rodgers. The image became cemented into the American musical mainstream with the 1960s revival of folk music and with the figure of the "singer-songwriter" that arose in its wake. Popular usage distinguishes between "classical" and "folk" acoustic guitars. The distinction is not a hard and fast one, but the latter term generally refers to a guitar that follows one of several innovations, developed by twentieth-century American manufacturers, that had the purpose of increasing the instrument's volume. These innovations included an increase in the size of the resonating chamber, a change in the shape of its top (resulting in a distinction between "arched-top" and "flat-top" guitars), and, eventually, the use of new materials for the strings, giving birth to a whole new family of instruments.

Strings Instruments