subject: History Of The Classic Guitar [print this page] History Of The Classic Guitar History Of The Classic Guitar
The bowl shaped harp, otherwise known as tanbur' was the start of the stringed instrument age we these days know as the guitar. Prehistoric craftsmen made these guitars out of tortoise shells and animal gut for strings. The Archaeological Museum in Cairo contains the ultimate vintage guitar which belonged to the Egyptian vocalist Har-Mose. It was constructed 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', whilst contributing frets and altering the form to a pear-like shape.
The lute was around in Europe from around 450AD up to mid-renaissance and improvements to the instrument were added along the way; including higher quality wood for the body and freeboard, better quality strings and original shapes to create marginally diverse tones. In Central Asia and Northern India, the traditional folk-stringed instrument lasted untouched for a couple of hundred years.
The prefix tar' was positioned in front of the sum of strings on the guitar to clarify its final name. For example, in modern Persian, do' is two, se', is three, char', is four and panj' is five; thus, a dotar has two strings, a setar has three strings, a chartar has four strings and a panjchar/panchtar has five strings. Everything was coherent.
In the European renaissance, the four string (four-course) instrument has become dominant. Although, near the end of the 16th Century in Italy, the five string 'guitarra battente' began to take over the four string guitar and the standard tuning for which was the current 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 ultimately twelve. The Italians were once again the pioneers of the concluding enhancements from five course guitars to the final six strings and this was a moderately uncomplicated job as it consisted of changing/adapting the nut and bridge and installing in an extra tuning peg hole for the sixth and ultimate string.
An exceptionally ornate guitar designed by a German man named Joakim Thielke (1641 1719), was altered in this way and was a sensation. The present day conventional guitar appearance' took its design from when the Spanish designer Antonio Torres increased the dimensions of the body, changed the whole guitars dimentions and introduced the revolutionary fan' top bracing; in around 1850. This design radically enhanced the guitars tone, volume and robustness and was so skillful and natural; it remains almost the same after hundreds of years.
