So What Is A Guitar???
THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT THE GUITAR!
It’s because no one either showed them anything useful or they never found out the basics of playing guitar.
DON’T BE LIKE THEM!
Here we are going to talk about those guitar basics in bite-sized chunks.
A guitar is a stringed instrument.
“What does that mean?”
It means those things whether they be metal, nylon, or plastic, produce the sounds you hear. On the guitar you have 6 strings. We will put off any musical talk about the strings including tuning or anything like that for a later post.
The guitar has an oddly shaped box, often called the body, with wooden front, back, and sides. The odd shape of the guitar is there so you can put it on your leg for support.
Then there’s the guitar neck, complete with frets. By pressing down on the frets, you shorten the string and change the sound that the string produces. Because the string can only be shortened, that means that the sounds can only go higher. The guitar is not all about that bass.
At the top of the neck there’s the head of the guitar.
Get it? Head, Neck, Body.
On the head of the guitar there are tuning pegs. These things make the strings change their sound and be "in-tune". More on that later.
The final parts that matter are dependent on what type of guitar you have.
If you have an acoustic guitar then you have a sound hole. The sound hole acts as the natural speaker for your instrument. When the strings are plucked the vibrations are sent into the hollow body. There, they're amplified by the hollow guitar body. The final sound ends up coming through the sound hole. Don’t believe me? Try filling in your guitar with cement and see how loud your guitar is.
If you have an electric guitar then you will see under the strings. Those are pickups and they operate like the sound hole. Except, the vibrations from the strings need more than the pickups. You need a second piece of gear (an amp) to hear those beautiful little sounds your guitar makes.
Let’s review the the guitar anatomy that matters to you:
The head (where the tuners live)
The neck (where the frets and strings are)
The body (where the sound hole or the pickups live).
There are other parts to the guitar to name, but they don’t matter to anyone other than people who make guitars. You focus on the things that make your guitar sound awesome.