The History of the Guitar: From Ancient Roots to Modern Marvels

The History of the Guitar: From Ancient Roots to Modern Marvels

With how popular the guitar has been for over a century, it’s easy to assume it’s always been around. But if the scope of musical history was compressed into an album, the guitar as we know it would only be in the final 20 seconds or so. If you’ve ever wondered about guitar history, Strings and Beyond is here to give you the highlights. While entire guitar history books are out there, this article will give you a taste of the instrument’s rich past and maybe inspire you to learn more.

The Lute and the Guitar

Like the violin, mandolin, sitar and banjo, it’s widely accepted that the guitar traces its roots to the lute. This instrument has a known history dating to 3100 BC with evidence connecting it to ancient Mesopotamia and the Middle Eastern Semites. While the lute took various forms as it evolved and spread throughout the ancient world, common features included:

• A hollow wood body with a pear or teardrop shape.
• A neck with or without frets.
• Strings the musicians pluck with their fingers or a pick/plectrum.
• A soundboard with a soundhole to resonate the string vibrations.

There were several stops along the path to becoming a guitar. Along with the European lute, the early Arab oud is another early guitar ancestor. Both had several double-coursed strings, which is when two strings are grouped closely and played as one. While the lute had frets and a wide neck, the oud had no frets and a narrow neck.

Several other guitar-like instruments followed. The gittern, a small instrument with single strings and a rounded back, was popular among European medieval court musicians and minstrels. A Spanish version that resembled a fiddle was alternately called the citole and the “guitarra Latina”, or Latin guitar. Meanwhile, a ninth-century lute variant had a sickle-shaped headstock and oversized body. In medieval times, this acquired the name of “guitarra morisca” or Moorish guitar. (Incidentally, the word “guitarra” was the origin of the English word “guitar” along with the French “guitare” and the German “gitarre.”)

The next step was the vihuela in 15^th-century Spain. This incorporated the figure-eight form and flat back we’re familiar with today, which made the instrument more portable. It used doubled strings (typically five or six sets) and was tuned like a lute. The last major stop was the Spanish baroque guitar which came about in the late 16^th century. This small, narrow-bodied instrument had five doubled string courses and was the source of the modern E-A-D-G-B-E guitar tuning (though there was no low E).

The Guitar Takes its Present Form

So what was the first instrument we can call a modern guitar? Although the exact date and creator remain a mystery, baroque guitars with six single strings started appearing in early 19^th-century Europe. Antonio de Torres Jurado, a Spanish luthier (what a shock, right?), is credited with developing the full-size guitar in the 1850s. By making the body longer and wider, the instrument became much louder so people could hear it in larger concert venues.

Jurado also added lighter, better-projecting soundboards with strut braces and standardized the symmetrical body. To prove the importance of the guitar’s top in shaping the sound, he once made a guitar with a paper-mâché back and sides but a normal top — and it remains playable today! To this day, the fundamental classical guitar design is based on Jurado’s instruments.

Guitars Go Steel-Stringed…and Electric

As the violin family has spawned variations like the viola and cello, so too has the guitar family welcomed other styles. Around the time of Jurado’s work, country music featuring bright-sounding steel banjo strings became popular in America. Christian Fredrick Martin — aka the founder of C.F. Martin & Company — wanted banjo players to be able to switch to guitar and developed one that could handle the added tension of steel strings. He made the instrument slightly smaller than the classical guitar, added an inner X-brace for strength and flattened the top so players could use a pick.

The steel-string acoustic remained rare until the early 1900s when guitars surged in popularity. This led to C.F. Martin & Company creating the dreadnought, a large-bodied guitar that produced louder and deeper tones than a classical guitar, and renewed interest in the steel-string version. The first mass-produced steel-string guitar was the Gibson L-5, a 1922 hollow-body guitar designed by Lloyd Loar that also debuted the arched top and back now associated with jazz guitars.

Then there’s electricity. As this power source entered the zeitgeist, it was inevitable someone would make a guitar they could plug in — if only to be heard over increasingly large orchestras. The first commercial electric guitar was a 1931 aluminum lap steel guitar with electromagnetic pickups developed by George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker. The instrument came to be known as the “Frying Pan.”

Electrified versions of hollow-body guitars soon followed. As for the solid-body electric guitar, several prototypes were developed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, including Les Paul’s version which became the basis for the legendary Gibson Les Paul released in 1952. The first commercially available solid-body electric guitar, though, was the Fender Esquire in 1949 — and the shape of the Fender Stratocaster (1954) has been copied countless times. Other landmarks were the first modern commercial seven-string guitar built by Epiphone in the late 1930s and the 12-string guitar, which started as a late-19^th-century novelty before 1920s blues and folk brought it to the forefront.

Find Strings for Your Guitar

One thing all guitars have in common is that they need good strings to sound their best. At Strings and Beyond, you’ll find hundreds of strings for acoustic, electric and classical guitars for the leading brands. Put a set on your guitar and feel the history every time you strum or pluck.