The History Of The Acoustic Guitar - Entertainment - Music

The bowl shaped harp, or the tanbur marked the start of the stringed instrument era we nowadays know as the guitar. Prehistoric people made these instruments out of tortoise shells and animal gut for strings.

The Archaeological Museum in Cairo is home to ultimate vintage guitar which belonged to the Egyptian singer Har-Mose. It was made from polished cedar wood and an animal hide soundboard. In Europe, an instrument called an oud was brought to Spain by the Moors and the Europeans renamed this instrument to a lute, at the same time as adding frets and changing the body to a pear-like shape.

The lute was around in Europe from around 450AD all the way up to mid-renaissance and improvements to the instrument were made along the way; including better quality wood for the boy and freeboard, better quality strings and innovative shapes to produce slightly different sounds. In Central Asia and Northern India, the traditional folk-stringed instrument remained unchanged for several hundred years.

The prefix tar was placed in front of the number of strings on the instrument to illustrate its full name. For example, in modern Persian, do is two, se, is three, char, is four and panj is five; hence, a dotar has two strings, a setar has three strings, a chartar has four strings and a panjchar/panchtar has five strings. Everything was logical.

In the European renaissance, the four string (four-course) instrument has become dominant. However, near the end of the 16th Century in Italy, the five course guitarra battente began to replace the four string instrument and the standard tuning for which was the modern day A, D, G, B, E for the top five strings. The amount of frets on the guitar also went up from eight, to ten and eventually twelve.

The Italians were once again the driving force of the final developments from five course guitars to the big six and this was a fairly easy job as it consisted of replacing/reworking the nut and bridge and plugging in another tuning peg hole for the sixth and final string.

An incredibly ornate guitar made by a German man called Joakim Thielke (1641 - 1719), was altered in this way and became a success. The modern classical guitar look took its present for when the Spanish maker Antonio Torres increased the size of the body, altered the whole guitars proportions and introduced the revolutionary fan top bracing; in around 1850. This design drastically improved the guitars tone, volume and durability and was so good and intuitive; it remains almost the same to this very day.

Gitarren Bodies