Guitar

The guitar is a plucked string instrument, sounded by plucking or strumming its strings, which run from the pegbox to a bridge glued to the soundboard. It probably originated in Spain early in the 16th century, deriving from the guitarra latina, a late-medieval instrument with a waisted body and four strings, and it was closely related to the vihuela.

The earliest recognizable guitars were small instruments strung with four double courses of gut, their frets tied from the same material and their tuning pegs worked by friction. A decorative rose ornamented the soundhole, while the bridge sat near the bottom of the body. The four-course instrument ran from a violin-like pegbox to a tension bridge, with the three lower courses doubled and the top course single. Its tuning was laid out in intervals of a fourth, a major third and a fourth, and the sixteenth-century repertory written for it embraced dances, fantasias, chansons and secular genres.

By the sixteenth century the guitar was tuned C–F–A–D, matching the centre four courses of the lute and the vihuela. The vihuela and the guitar coexisted until the seventeenth century, when the guitar superseded the vihuela.

The Baroque guitar carried five double courses, and its body was slightly larger than that of its predecessors, averaging approximately 92 cm in length with string lengths of 63 to 70 cm. Its music was often written in a characteristic Italian notation called alfabeto, a letter system representing strummed block chords, which served both solos and accompaniments.

The five-course guitar was a Spanish favourite, and from Spain it spread to Italy, then to France, England, Germany and the Low Countries across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Before 1800 the guitar was strung in double courses, pairs of strings set close together and struck as one. That arrangement gave way to single strings tuned E-A-D-G-B-E, the tuning that remains standard today.

The innovations of the nineteenth century were largely the work of Antonio Torres, whose designs produced the classical guitar as it is now known. His instrument was strung with three gut strings and three metal-spun silk strings, a combination later revised when nylon replaced gut.

Variant forms of the instrument persist alongside the classical model. The twelve-stringed guitar retains the principle of double courses, while the Mexican jarana and the South American charango are both small five-course guitars.

From the 17th to the early 19th century the guitar remained an amateur's instrument, though a few virtuoso guitarists became known in Europe, among them Gaspar Sanz, Fernando Sor and Joseph Kaspar Mertz.

Andrés Segovia was born in Linares in 1893 and died in Madrid in 1987. Largely self-taught because no competent teacher was available and the instrument was held in low repute, he gave his first public concert in 1909 while a student at the Granada Musical Institute, and by the time of his first Paris performance in 1924 his reputation was international. He produced more than 150 transcriptions from lute, vihuela and harpsichord, and encouraged the writing of works for the guitar by 20th-century composers, including Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Manuel Ponce.

The strings of a guitar make hardly any noise on their own; in an acoustic instrument the vibration of the string is transferred via the bridge and saddle to the top plate of the guitar. An important function of the braces is to keep the top plate flat despite the action of the strings, and the braces also affect the way the top plate vibrates. The fat strings are usually composite, with a thin core wrapped with windings to make them more massive without making them harder to bend.

An electric guitar is a plucked stringed instrument that relies on electronic amplification to be heard at a louder volume, translating the vibrations of its strings into electric signals that an external amplifier or speaker then amplifies. The instrument's lineage reaches back to the early 1930s, when George Beauchamp, working with Adolph Rickenbacker, produced an electromagnetic pickup. Introduced on a lap-steel known as the Frying Pan, that pickup made the guitar the first commercially viable electric.

The Slingerland company commercially introduced a Spanish solid-body electric guitar in 1939, and around 1940 Les Paul mounted strings and pickups on a solid block of pine, on an instrument dubbed the Log. Pickups of this kind fall into two families, single-coil and double-coil, the latter also called humbucking. In a solid-body instrument the great mass has minimal response, so the pickup captures a cleaner signal of the strings' pure tone.

Fender's early business lay in lap steel guitars and amplifiers before it turned to the solid-body instrument, and the Broadcaster stands among the very first solid-body electric guitars. A trademark held by Gretsch obliged the company to drop the Broadcaster label, and the guitars shipped without a name acquired the nickname Nocaster; Don Randall proposed the name Telecaster in 1951. Introduced in 1950 as the Broadcaster and renamed in 1951, the Telecaster remains outwardly close to its earliest ancestors even 75 years on. At the trade show it was mocked as a boat paddle and a snow shovel.

The Telecaster became central to the Bakersfield Sound, pioneered in the later 1950s and popularized in the 1960s by Buck Owens and his band. The 1959 Custom Telecaster added a bound body and a rosewood fingerboard. Seth Lover, who had pioneered hum-cancelling pickups at Gibson in the mid-1950s, joined Fender in 1967 and developed the Fender Wide Range humbucking pickups.

Syd Barrett recorded Pink Floyd's debut with a Telecaster and an Esquire. Luther Perkins accompanied Johnny Cash from 1954 on a Telecaster and an Esquire, and Scotty Moore played a Telecaster during Elvis Presley's Sun Studios sessions.

The Les Paul Standard became available in 1952, and two years later Fender introduced the iconic Stratocaster, which featured three electric pickups instead of two. The Jazzmaster made its debut in 1958 but failed to take off with jazz artists, who preferred semi-hollow body guitars.

Les Paul was an American jazz and country guitarist and inventor who was perhaps best known for his design of a solid-body electric guitar. He pioneered the development of multitrack recording and is credited with having invented the first eight-track tape recorder. His lifelong innovations included echo delay, overdubbing and multitracking.

The electric guitar became a symbol and talisman for the youth culture of the 1950s. In the 1960s manufacturers started equipping preamplifiers with a range of effects, and guitarists used these innovations to explore new sounds and create new subgenres of rock music.

Because of their ability to make fuller and louder sounds, electric guitars lent themselves to use as solo instruments as well as rhythm instruments, and they allow techniques such as string-bending, hammering and sliding.Pickups are often attached to violins, lutes and other instruments as well as to guitars, making these instruments usable in noisy environments and vast amphitheaters.

Jazz soloist Charlie Christian, who gained prominence in the late 1930s with the Benny Goodman Sextet, was the electric guitar's first virtuoso player. Jimi Hendrix achieved spectacular effects by maneuvering the guitar's tremolo arm and playing close to the amplifier.

Flamenco is an artistic expression that fuses cante, baile and toque, and it first emerged in Andalusia in the early 19th century with a great variety of styles. Andalusia is its heartland, though its roots also extend to Murcia and Extremadura. It is performed during religious festivals, rituals, church ceremonies and at private celebrations, and it serves as a badge of identity for numerous communities, in particular the Gitano (Roma) ethnic community.

Within flamenco, toque is the art of guitar playing, originally accompanying song and dance. The tradition sustains craft practices including guitar, shoe and costume making. Flamenco was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List in 2010.

The Andalusian Centre for Flamenco was created in Jerez de la Frontera in 1989 and holds the largest flamenco archive in the world, with more than 300,000 records.

Fado is a performance genre incorporating music and poetry practised in Lisbon, usually sung by a solo singer traditionally accompanied by a wire-strung acoustic guitar and the Portuguese guitarra, a pear-shaped cittern with twelve wire strings unique to Portugal. Its dissemination through emigration and the world music circuit has reinforced its image as a symbol of Portuguese identity. Fado was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List in 2011.

The Royal College of Music holds among its instruments the earliest dated guitar, made by Belchior Dias in Lisbon in 1581 and counted among the museum's highlights. Its collections also include Kurt Cobain's 1959 Martin D-18E, described as the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, which was donated to the Royal College of Music.

The Martin family arrived in New York City from Germany and initially settled at 196 Hudson Street, where they opened the first Martin Guitar workshop in the New World. Since its founding in 1833 by Christian Frederick Martin, Martin Guitar has been a trailblazer in the world of acoustic guitar craftsmanship.

• 1939
  Slingerland solid-body
  The Slingerland company commercially introduced a Spanish solid-body electric guitar. ^{7The Invention of the Electric Guitar (Lemelson Center) · Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History ↗}
• c. 1940
  The Log
  Les Paul mounted strings and pickups on a solid block of pine, on an instrument dubbed the Log. ^{7The Invention of the Electric Guitar (Lemelson Center) · Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History ↗}
• 1941
  Les Paul solid-body
  The guitarist Les Paul created the iconic solid-body electric guitar. ^{6Electric guitar · Encyclopaedia Britannica ↗}