Six Strings and Centuries: The Story of the Guitar

Look at these three things: a piece of stretched animal gut, a hollow wooden box, and a loudspeaker. What could they possibly have in common? Believe it or not, all three have played a part in giving us one of the world's most popular instruments — the guitar! Before you read on, have a think about what you already know. Have you ever seen or heard a guitar? Where have you heard one — at a concert, on a video, at home?

The guitar has a long and exciting history going back thousands of years. **Very Early String Instruments** People have been plucking strings stretched over hollow objects for at least 3,500 years. Ancient carvings from Mesopotamia (a region in what is now Iraq) show people playing instruments that look a little like guitars. These early instruments used animal gut — the dried intestines of animals — stretched tight to make strings that vibrated and produced sound. **The Oud and the Lute** Around 1,000 years ago, an instrument called the oud was played across the Middle East and North Africa. When Arab musicians brought it to Europe, European craftspeople changed its design and called the new version a lute. The lute had a round, pear-shaped back and was very popular in Europe between the 1400s and 1600s. **The Vihuela and the Early Guitar** In Spain in the 1400s and 1500s, musicians played an instrument called the vihuela. It had a flat back — more like modern guitars. From the vihuela, a smaller four-course guitar developed. A 'course' means a pair of strings tuned to the same note. By the late 1700s, the guitar had grown to six single strings — the number we recognise today. **The Classical and Acoustic Guitar** In the early 1800s, a Spanish craftsman named Antonio de Torres Jurado made guitars bigger with a wider body. This design made the sound louder and richer. His design became the template — the model — for what we now call the classical guitar and the acoustic guitar. An acoustic guitar makes sound purely from the vibration of its strings and the hollow wooden body. No electricity is needed. **The Electric Guitar** By the 1930s, musicians in big, noisy dance halls found that acoustic guitars were too quiet. Inventors began fitting guitars with a pickup — a small device that senses string vibrations and turns them into an electrical signal. A loudspeaker then turns the signal back into loud sound. In 1950, Leo Fender produced one of the first mass-produced solid-body electric guitars. Unlike an acoustic, a solid-body electric guitar does not need a hollow box to make sound — the pickup does the work. The electric guitar changed music for ever, powering styles like blues, rock and roll, and pop.