About guitars in general

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The Guitar
Buying your guitar
Anatomy of a guitar
Tuning your guitar
Restringing a guitar

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To the right are the main kinds of guitar, but there are more: Baritone guitars have just four strings; some resonator guitars have a metal body; some nylon string guitars can have electronic amplification; other resonators have a square neck and are meant to be played on your lap with a slide. Some guitars have 7 or even 10 strings; some have two necks, one six-string, the other 12 string.

All guitars are played in the same way and the fretboards are all laid out in the same way. 'Acoustic' guitars rely solely on their construction for volume, whereas electrics rely either totally or partially on electronics for theirs. Solid body guitars were invented to prevent "feedback", which is that howling sound you hear when microphones (or pickups) start re-amplifying their own sound. Because they get their volume from the pickups, the strings used on electric guitars can be very thin, making it much easier to play fast and to bend. Steel string acoustics need heavier strings to be heard properly, and are therefore a little harder to play at first. Your finger tips do toughen up, though, with regular playing.

Beginners often choose nylon string guitars because they're friendlier on the fingers and have a wider fingerboard making it easier to grab chord shapes.

The Guitar

The guitar is a mini orchestra, an instrument designed to let you play chords, bass lines and melody lines ... all at the same time. It truly is the most versatile of all instruments and no wonder it became so popular. Keyboards also have this capacity, but guitars, apart from the obvious advantage of being portable, have a multiplicity of positions for the same chunks of music, which (in my humble opinion) give them the edge.

The fact that strings can be bent, slid upon (my specialty), hammered on and pulled off, not to mention palmed, muted, tapped, strummed, plucked and caressed ... no contest really. It's also one of the more complicated instruments to come to grips with. Between the maze-like fretboard and the many techniques used to extract music from these boxes, there's a lot to know, which is why I've put this site together for you.


Classical nylon String - The original, traditional guitar. In the old days, the strings were made of cat-gut. This is the kind of guitar that classical and Flamenco players use. It's the easiest kind of guitar to start out on and they're played with the fingers, not picks.	Acoustic steel 6 string - Steel string guitars are bigger and louder that nylon string, and are the most popular of the acoustics. They're harder on the fingers. They're usually strummed with a flat pick, but are also played with bare fingers or finger-picks.	Acoustic steel 12 string - Bigger and heavier than 6 strings, these guitars have 6 pairs of strings. They're tuned and played in the same way, but have much greater volume and a very jangley sound. They're usually strummed. Not for beginners!	Acoustic resonator - Resonator guitars were invented before electronics amplified guitars. The round 'resonator' acts as a loud speaker, making them much louder than plain acoustic guitars. Often played using a slide, or "bottleneck", in Country and Blues music.


Solid body electric - The most popular kind of electric guitar. The sound comes from the 'pickups' (which are essentially microphones) which feed the sound into an amplifier. They have very little sound when played without the electronics.	Semi hollow body electric Almost the same as the solid body. These can be heard without plugging them into an amplifier, but only just. The hollow cavity gives them a slightly different tone than the solid body.	Hollow body electric Played mainly by jazz artists, these sound good un-plugged; the pickups simply add volume to the acoustic sound. They're also known as "archtops" because of their arched soundboard.	Acoustic electric Acoustic electrics are just acoustics with some built in electronics to boost the volume. Often used in band situations where a normal acoustic gets drowned out by the other instruments.