The history of playing guitar 101

As we are inundated daily with pictures of swaggering rock dudes and diva goddesses slinging shapely, powerful axes underneath streaming spotlights, we may guess that there was always such adulation and ubiquitous acceptance of the guitar. Well.....not so. Way back when, the life of a guitar-slinger was veeeeeery fringe, fraught with uncertainty, fragile hopes for a daily meal, and most certainly UNglamorous.

So where'd it start? In 15th century Spain we find the classical guitar's humble beginnings. Did you know when it started it was smaller and had a total of EIGHT strings? Four pairs of strings originally played across the sound-hole. It was sort of like "one day I'll grow up big and strong and be a 12-string!!" Each pair of strings was called a 'course' at that time.

Another fine instrument, the lute, caught most of the glory back in those days (if you're interested, you can hear the lute played by Sting on his album released last year called "Songs From The Labyrinth"). It took some decades before the guitar was taken seriously. Around the 17th century a fifth 'course' was added to the guitar. It was then that the instrument finally began to be taken seriously and some very fine classical composers began to write music around its potential.

Finally in the 1700's the guitar was transformed into something more akin to our current models: the string pairs were reduced to single strings, and a sixth string was added to round out the sound and expand its tonal range.

So what took so long for the Beatles, for heaven's sake? ;-)

The esteemed luthier of violins, Stradivarius, also made guitars. If you happen to have one of those...well, come on...it's SO old now! You might as well just send it to me before you mistake it for firewood on a cold winter's night. I'll, uh....I'll find, uh....SOMETHING constructive to do with it. I promise. ;-)

The only thing left to do to bring the guitar into our modern styling was to increase its size. It was still pretty small and narrow back then. So, in the mid- to late-1800's the Spanish father of the modern guitar, Antonio de Torres, improved the instrument dramatically by enlarging it, changing the internal bracing, and sculpting the shape so that it resonated much more.

The whammy bar though was still a ways off. ;-)

Other interesting factoids: Franz Shubert often composed on a guitar that he hung above his bed. Until 1946 guitar strings were made of (faint of heart stop reading here)...the small intestines of sheep (some violinists today still use these 'catgut' strings)! And what about steel strings? Those were first put on by a German immigrant to America, Christian Friedrich Martin, (yes, THAT Martin) who designed guitars with steel strings so they could be heard over another louder American instrument - the banjo!

Well, that pretty much brings us up into the 20th century. More about the SUPER proliferation of guitar kinds and styles in the past century in my next entry.

Now let's all go have another Thanksgiving turkey sandwich, shall we....! ;-)