Guitar

The guitar is a stringed musical instrument played by plucking or strumming. Most guitars have six strings stretched over a long neck and a hollow or solid body. When a player plucks a string, it vibrates, and the body of the guitar makes the sound louder. Guitars are used in almost every kind of music, from classical to rock to country to flamenco.

There are two main families of guitars. Acoustic guitars have a hollow wooden body with a round hole in the middle. The hole lets sound bounce around inside the wood, which makes the music loud enough to hear without any help. Electric guitars have a solid body and small parts called pickups under the strings. The pickups turn the string's vibrations into an electric signal, which travels through a cable to an amplifier. Without the amplifier, an electric guitar sounds very quiet.

A player changes notes by pressing the strings against thin metal bars on the neck called frets. Each fret marks a different note. The player's other hand plucks the strings or strums across all of them at once. By pressing several strings at the same time, the player makes a chord, which is a group of notes that sound good together.

The guitar has a long history. Stringed instruments shaped like guitars have been around for at least 4,000 years, since the time of ancient Egypt. The modern six-string acoustic guitar took shape in Spain in the 1800s. A Spanish maker named Antonio de Torres built guitars that were bigger and louder than earlier ones, and his design is still copied today.

The electric guitar is much newer. Inventors started experimenting with them in the 1930s because acoustic guitars were too quiet to be heard in big jazz bands. In 1950, an American inventor named Leo Fender began making solid-body electric guitars in a small factory in California. His design, along with one made by Les Paul for the Gibson company, helped create the sound of rock and roll. By the 1960s, bands like The Beatles and groups led by players like Jimi Hendrix had made the electric guitar one of the most famous instruments in the world.

Today the guitar is one of the most popular instruments anywhere. It is small enough to carry, cheap enough for many families to own, and easy enough to start playing within a few weeks. A skilled player, though, can spend a lifetime learning new things on it.