Gaskell Guitars asked:


The following article does not apply to classical guitar playing which is in a separate league of it’s own and employs different principles to all other genres of guitar playing. This article is about learning to play guitar in any of the following styles: Blues, Jazz, Country, R&B, Rock, Pop, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal.

Although the guitar has been around since the beginning of the 20th Century, it wasn’t until the late 1960′s that guitar playing reached whole new levels of skill and accomplishment.

Key to this was the evolution of the electric guitar.

Up until the 1960′s what “playing the guitar” meant was basically “strumming chords.” Lead playing (playing scales) was very much still in it’s infancy. The guitar was a “strumming instrument.” 20th Century dictionaries defined the guitar as an “instrument played by strumming.”

In the early days of electric guitar (1920′s and 1930′s), electric guitars were really just glorified miked up acoustic guitars. They were played and treated as if they were acoustic guitars. It would be much later, in the 1950s, that a new thing would happen: the invention of the solid-body guitar.

During this pre-1960s primitive era, the guitar was most definitely a right handed instrument built to be strummed with the right hand and chords fingered with the left hand. The theory was that the “strong” arm of the player (being right handed) would be the one to keep the rhythm hence, the task of strumming was for the right hand. Left hand technique in those days was limited to managing finger-chords and maybe a few barre chords. Even though the approach to playing guitar back then is as outdated as black and white television, there are some aspects, attitudes, of those times that are still with us and need to be seriously re evaluated on a grand scale. What are we talking about?

Firstly, you need to refresh yourself as to what changed in the 1950′s and 1960′s.

Starting from the 1950s and peaking in the late 1960s, came a new wave of guitarists that took guitar playing to a new level. Some of those key innovaters were Chuck Berry, Alvin Lee, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, and many more. These innovators tried new things and were able to make the guitar do more than it had ever been required to “do” before. Two major advances were key to this era:



The advent of the solid body guitar. With solid body electric guitars such as the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul, the electric guitar was no longer a miked up acoustic guitar. You couldn’t play one without an amp! New demands were put upon guitar players. And new possibilities!



Advances in amplification were required, quickly invented or further improved in order to cope with the necessary volumes required for larger crowds, and larger concerts and festivals. Advances in amplification opened the door to advances in guitar playing: feedback, sustain, purposefully employed overdrive and distortion. Volume enabled new things to be possible.



From the late 1960′s and into the 1970s a very major advance happened: LEAD GUITAR came into it’s own. Solos, scales – and not just the tired pentatonic scale overused in Blues music. Bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Queen, Ted Nugent, all shaped music and gave birth to the “Rock” and “Heavy Metal” scene of the 1980s, when Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Poison, Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot, Metallica etc etc etc. came into their own. On the other side of things, Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Stevie Ray Vaughn took Blues Rock to a new level, and added took lead playing and guitar solos to new levels in that genre. The list goes on.

When Eddie Van Halen came on the scene with the song “Eruption” at the end of the 1970′s, new techniques such as “finger tapping” came to be. Now people used TWO HANDS on the fret board! The whammy bar became something else. Floyd Rose and Kahler came up with floating tremolo systems that allowed new and more extreme whammy bar techniques without driving the guitar hopelessly out of tune. There were no “dive bombs” before this time!

Where are we going with this?

Today, skilled guitar playing is beyond anything that ever was imagined in the primitive pre-1960′s era when guitar was only a “strumming instrument.”

With lead guitar, there is more demand on the players ability to get around the fret board.

It’s no longer about strumming chords! It hasn’t been for a very long time! You can still be very mediocre and be a “strummer” if you want to, but for those who want to get good at playing guitar there is a change of thinking required.

This is the mentality that needs a total overhaul here: Right handed people are still being taught to play “right handed” guitars. This is AN OBSOLETE, DATED AND DEFUNCT ACTIVITY!

To become a really good guitarist a right handed person needs to learn how to play guitar “left handed.” This means that the right handed person’s “strong” hand plays the fretboard. Why would you put your “weak” (left) hand to the hardest task in playing guitar?

Here is an example in reverse: one of the greatest guitarists ever is the incredible Gary Moore. He plays a right handed guitar. But is he right handed? No, he is a left handed person playing a right handed guitar. And how many people can play like he? Reverse this and consider how “good” you could be if you were a right handed person playing a left handed guitar? You could possibly become as good as Gary Moore, or any of the many many Guitar gods who are really left handed people who play right handed guitar.

This is not a coincidence.

Right handed people need to learn to play guitar left handed if they want to take guitar playing to levels beyond “strumming. ” PARENTS TAKE NOTE. This rests with you in the main. If your kid wants to become a “great guitarist”, get them a left handed guitar, if they are right handed and give them a right handed guitar if they are left handed.

Do this and lo and behold: NEW VISTAS OF ACHIEVEMENT IN PLAYING GUITAR ARE POSSIBLE. We live in the 21st Century and guitar playing is nothing like it was in the Stone Age of the pre-1960s.



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Victor Epand asked:


When you think of guitars, many people immediately think about one of two types – either the popular electric guitar used so prevalently by bands and groups that produce popular music, and the classical guitars more traditionally used for softer music, and classical music itself. The one distinctive attribute of a classical guitar is its ability to allow the musician to construct and play arrangements of music with multiple notes being played simultaneously, what is known as polyphonic music, and this is similar is in many respects to the traditional pianoforte.

This ability to play polyphonic music is the one aspect above all others that sets the classical guitar aside from other types, including the popular acoustic guitar, bass guitars and the electric guitars, which are more limited in the notes and combinations which can be played. Although often it may be suggested that classical guitars are not the only type to be capable of this polyphonic sound, and that flamenco guitars offer the same opportunity, there is still one great difference that sets the two types of guitar aside. Classical guitars, as with most guitars, are designed to be plucked or strummed, whereas flamenco guitars are far more percussive, being played almost as though in the style of a piano, with the strings being struck or hit to create the resonating note, and this difference in playing method creates a very significant difference in the type of sound or voice, and the style of music that each instrument is capable of producing.

The classical guitar that we tend to think of has a broad family, and across the whole world the classical guitar comes in many flavours, each sharing the same quality and characteristic of being able to play polyphonic musical arrangements, but each lending the music a distinctive quality which reflects the different musical traditions and patterns of the culture of each country. For example, a wide range of guitars can be found in Mexico, with the very small guitar known as the requinto, and then the much larger guitarron which is so much larger that it competes with a cello for size, and therefore produces a much more deeply resonating sound, and is tuned to the same register as a bass guitar.

A similar range of different sizes and styles can be seen in Columbia too, with the smallest guitar being known as the bandola, and is most popularly used as a travelling guitar, since its small size allows it to be packed or carried with relatively little difficulty. A slightly larger version of the classical guitar than the bandola is the tiple, and this is mid way between the bandola and the classical guitar, although he classical guitar does itself appear in the Columbian repertoire. The classical guitar, or as they are often referred to today, the classic guitar, owes its shape and traditionally agreed dimensions to a man named Antonio Torres Jurado who lived from 1817 to 1892.

Today the modern classic guitar has ten strings, which is four more than a traditional guitar with only six. These four extra strings, called resonators, are tuned in a very special way that means that they can be played, and will resonate in tune to any of the twelve notes that can be played chromatically on the higher strings. The three bass strings on a classic ten string guitar are tuned in the same way, and this extra tuning for resonance is felt to improve and complement the sonority of the sound, giving a much more distinctive, clear and full performance of the music. Modern classic guitars are available in a number of different versions which can be played within different octaves, with the soprano guitar being used to play a full octave higher than a normal guitar, and a contrabass guitar achieving notes a full octave lower.



classical guitar

Guitars from Spain asked:


Acoustic electric Guitars: this is a term used to describe acoustic guitars that have pickups installed in them so they can be plugged into amplifiers or PA systems. The majority of acoustic guitars you see on stage are acoustic electric guitars. Structurally, they are identical to traditional acoustic guitars.

Electric Guitars: these types of guitars made out of a solid piece of wood and rely exclusively on their electronic pickup systems and amplifiers for their volume. Their unique sound lends itself best to rock and roll, but they have also substantially shaped the sound of country music in the last 50 years. (Think “twang”)

Classical Guitars: also called “nylon-string”, classical guitars are used almost exclusively in the classical and folk idioms, but can also be found on more popular recordings. Carlos Santana makes a lot of use of the classical guitar in his

recordings. Slightly smaller than a traditional acoustic, they feature slightly wider necks and strings that are made of nylon rather than steel, to give them a very gentle, warm sound. The best Classical guitars are usually from Spain.

Hollow-body Guitars: These are simply traditional electric guitars that have chambers cut in the body to allow for more sonic resonance. They come in many different sizes and are favored primarily by players of blues and jazz music.

Steel Guitars: These are the farthest breed apart from traditional guitars so far. While any guitarist can pick up any guitar

from the above list and play, a steel guitar requires special training to play. The guitar is played flat on its back, and the strings are elevated approximately half an inch above the fretboard. This allows the strings to be played using a “tone bar” that takes the place of the fingers on a fretboard and gives the steel guitar its classic “crying sound”. This is the archetypal guitar sound.



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Kevin Sinclair asked:


A guitar, which is a hollow-bodied stringed instrument with a neck, produces sound when the strings’ vibrations resonate through its body.

There are three basic types of guitar: the electric guitar, the acoustic guitar, and the classical guitar.

The electric guitar converts the sound of the vibrating strings into electronic current. These electronic signals are then altered and produce the desired pitch and vibration before they are fed to amplifiers. Because an electric guitar uses these “pickups,” the body does not need to be resonant as it does with the other types of guitar. An electric guitar is used for all different kinds of music, such as country, pop, jazz, rock and roll, and heavy metal.

The acoustic guitar is shaped much like the classical guitar (described below) in terms of its appearance and shape. This type of guitar does not use amplifiers for its sound traditionally, although they can be added. An acoustic guitar uses steel strings for a louder and brighter sound than the nylon strings of the classical guitar. The acoustic guitar also uses heavier woods than does the classical guitar, including maple, mahogany, and spruce. This is because the steel strings on the acoustic guitar produce more tension than the nylon strings of the classical guitar do. This type of guitar is usually used in country, folk and blues music. It can also be used in different types of rock music. Oftentimes, acoustic guitars can also have built-in electronics so that their sound can be amplified louder than they would have been traditionally.

Finally, the classical guitar is also known as the “Spanish guitar.” It’s the most common of the three types of guitar. Its body is hollow, as with the acoustic guitar. The hole in the center acts to resonate the sound produced by the strings when they are plucked and strummed. It uses six strings, which are usually made of nylon. They are less taut than are the steel strings of the acoustic guitar. Usually, this type of guitar is played without amplifiers. The sound can be “amplified” simply, however, by just placing the guitar in front of a microphone. The classical guitar is usually used in Latin, flamenco and classical music.

All three types of guitars (classical, acoustic and electric) can be used by one person alone or by playing with other guitar players. However, electric guitars are much louder than classical or acoustic guitars, and are generally not mixed with acoustic or classical guitars. However, it’s often true that rock bands, for example, play electric guitars with accompaniment such as drums, trumpets or other louder instrumentation that can’t be easily overpowered by the electric guitar’s volume.



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Anne Tide asked:


The acoustic guitar is one of the most popular musical instruments in the world and it is actually a guitar that uses only acoustic methods to project the sound produced by the vibration of the strings. Because the strings displace a rather small amount of air there is need for amplifiers so that the air can be heard. The amplifiers are the sound board and a resonant cavity, also called the sound box. The body of the acoustic guitars are hollow and the vibrating strings move the sound board through the bridge and move it back and forth with every cycle of the string’s vibration. If the sound board weighs less the sound is louder. However, there are limitations to how thin the sound board can be made so that the guitars won’t break.

These musical instruments have braces inside that provide strength and resistance. As the sound board has a large surface area it naturally displaces a bigger volume of air, thus producing louder sounds than the strings alone and its vibrations produce sound waves from both back and front faces. The sound box of these musical instruments provides support for the sound board and also a resonant cavity and reflector for the sound waves that are produced within the back face of the sound board. The acoustic guitars’ back vibrates too (but to a lesser extent) and is also driven by the air in the cavity. In the end, the sound is pushed through a hole into the body (sound hole). At this point, the sound mixes with the sound produced by the front face, resulting in a complex mixture of harmonics that give acoustic guitars their distinctive sound.

One of the most popular styles of these musical instruments is the Dreadnought, which represents a big instrument with a full sound, a lot like a bass guitar. The dreadnought guitars are created to accompany singers and fit into a wide range of musical idioms. If you are an average player, this is definitely the right guitar for you.

12 String Dreadnought – a type of acoustic guitar that has 12 strings, which work in pairs tuned to the same notes. The first and second pairs are tuned to the same pitch and the rest are tuned to the same notes one octave apart. Thus, has a 12 string has a richer timbre, while the notes and chord shapes are the same as the standard six-string. However, the additional string tension makes these musical instruments somewhat less than ideal for beginners.

Cutaway Dreadnought – is another style of dreadnought guitar, which has a cutaway that allows access to the highest register. Not everyone appreciate these types of guitars, but the truth is that anyone who wants to play those frets needs to be able to reach them.

Parlor Style – these acoustic guitars usually have smaller bodies than other types of guitars and this is done in order to provide for a more even frequency response. Generally, the neck of parlor guitars is wider and is most often the choice of finger style players. The wider neck better accommodates this style of player giving him/her more room to get individual fingers between the strings. The mid frequencies of these musical instruments are punchy and pleasing making these guitars a good choice for all, except classical or flamenco players.

Classical Guitar (Nylon String Guitar) – Classical guitars are famous for their use of nylon strings. These musical instruments have a wide neck and a very flat fingerboard. Instructors usually recommend it for beginners as the lighter string tension and greater string gauge are easier on the fingers. Classical guitars are best for classical music, thus if you intend to play more popular musical styles you are advised to stick to the metal strings.

Jumbo Acoustic Guitar – Jumbo guitars are created to be loud almost like a bass guitar. It is very similar in functions to the dreadnaught. Keep in mind that they tend to get lost in the mid frequencies as they are overpowered by the bass.



classical guitar