Guitar

Guitar

The guitar is a musical instrument of the chordophone family, being a stringed instrument played by plucking, either with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number but sometimes more, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with either nylon orsteel strings. Some modern guitars are made of polycarbonate materials. Guitars are made and repaired by luthiers. There are two primary families of guitars: acoustic and electric.
Acoustic guitars (and similar instruments) which have hollow bodies, have been in use for over a thousand years. There are three main types of modern acoustic guitar: the classical guitar (nylon-string guitar), thesteel-string acoustic guitar, and the archtop guitar. The tone of an acoustic guitar is produced by the vibration of the strings which is amplified by the body of the guitar, which acts as a resonating chamber. The classical guitar is often played as a solo instrument using a comprehensive fingerpicking technique. Electric guitars, introduced in the 1930s, rely on an amplifier that can electronicallymanipulate tone. Early amplified guitars employed a hollow body, but a solid body was found more suitable. Electric guitars have had a continuing profound influence on popular culture. Guitars are recognized as the primary instruments in flamenco, jazz, blues, country, mariachi, rock music, and many forms of pop.
History

Before the development of the electric guitar and the use of syntheticmaterials, a guitar was defined as being an instrument having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides".[1] The term is used to refer to a number of related instruments that were developed and used across Europe beginning in the 12th century and, later, in the Americas.[2] These instruments are descended from ones that existed in ancientcentral Asia and India. For this reason guitars are distantly related to modern instruments from these regions, including the tanbur, the setar and the sitar, among others. The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument displaying the essential features of a guitar is a 3,300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.[3]
The modern word "guitar" was adopted into English from Spanishguitarra (German Gitarre, French Guitare),[4] loaned from the medieval Andalusian Arabic قيثارة qitara,[5] itself derived from the Latin cithara, which in turn came from the earlier Greek word kithara (κιθάρα),[6] a descendant of Old Persian sihtar ( سی تار) (Tar means string in Persian).[7]
The guitar is descended from the Roman cithara brought by the Romans to Hispania around 40 AD, and furtheradapted and developed with the arrival of the four-string oud, brought by the Moors after their conquest of Iberia in the 8th century.[8] Elsewhere in Europe, the indigenous six-string Scandinavian lut (lute), had gained in popularity in areas of Viking incursions across the continent. Often depicted in carvings c. 800 AD, the Norse hero Gunther (also known as Gunnar), played a lute with his toes as helay dying in a snake-pit, in the legend of Siegfried.[9] By 1200 AD, the four-string "guitar" had evolved into two types: the guitarra moresca (Moorish guitar) which had a rounded back, wide fingerboard and several soundholes, and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) which resembled the modern guitar with one soundhole and a narrower neck.[10] In the 14th and 15th centuries the qualifiers "moresca"and "latina" were dropped and these four course instruments were simply called guitars.[11]
The Spanish vihuela or (in Italian) "viola da mano", a guitar-like instrument of the 15th and 16th centuries, is often considered a major influence in the development of the modern guitar. It had six courses (usually), lute-like tuning in fourths and a guitar-like body, although early representations...