Guitar's Structure

''Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, save perhaps two.'' Frederick Chopin's words are a reflection of a belief shared by many people around the world (DeMao 1). A guitar's beauty, though, involves more than just its outward appearance. Guitars are complex structures with a variety of individual parts that each play a role in the overall quality and sound of a guitar. It is that overall quality and sound of a guitar that determines its beauty. In order to understand the quality and sound of a guitar, though, one must first understand the anatomy of a guitar. From top to bottom, a guitar contains a head, a neck, and a body (Hunter and Bacon 88). On the head of a guitar, there are six tuning keys, or tuners, that each hold the top of a string. Between the head and the neck, there is something called a nut (88). Then, on the neck there is a long plank called a fingerboard on which a guitarist would press down the different strings. The fingerboard has numerous metal strips called frets that separate the different notes (90). Below the neck, the body of different guitars varies in shape and size, but all bodies serve the same purpose. On the body, there are electronic pickups that help guitarists amplify the sound from a guitar. Also, below the pickups, there are other parts such as the bridge and the tailpiece that hold the bottom of the strings in place (88). A guitar's overall quality and sound is affected by its structure, its various parts and accessories, and by electronic influences, and there’s no better time to explore those things than now.

A guitar's structure is what makes a guitar look and sound like a guitar. John Calkin states, "Obviously, not all guitars sound alike, but even when we think we can distinguish a night-and-day difference, it won't be so extreme that one [guitar] will sound like a guitar and another won't. We may have a strong preference for one or another, but they will all sound like guitars. If they didn't, they would be called something else" (1). Guitars can be made out of a variety of different woods, and many of those woods have very different qualities. "Aside from possessing the strength necessary to support the tension of four to 12 strings, 'tonewoods' have a tendency to resonate at frequencies sympathetic to the pitch of the note or chords played." (Ratner 1). Brett Ratner continues in his article about tonewoods and describes the qualities of specific woods and how they affect the sound of a guitar. He states that spruce is a light wood with a tight grain which allows the guitar wood to vibrate "much like a speaker cone" (2). Calkin says woods like rosewood and maple that are hard, heavy, and dense are ideal for supporting the tension of strings as a neck and have a good bass sound (2). Also, woods like mahogany and walnut that are strong and stable are ideal for the body of a guitar. Ratner claims that they produce a "warm" sound (2-4). For fingerboards, Ratner says that ebony is a good wood because it is strong and durable. Calkin, a professional luthier, has a different opinion about tonewoods. "The concept of tonewoods is a hoax. Of the few things that we can do to a guitar and still call it a guitar, changing the wood it is made of will have the least impact upon the quality of the sound that it produces" (Calkin 1). Calkin says:

Many luthiers and musicians alike spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars collecting information and recordings and they have come to have a stake in the sanctity of its rightness. They need the vast body of instrument mythology to be correct, and strongly oppose the possibility that it may be bogus. This makes it extremely difficult for a daring luthier to sell instruments that aren't made of standard varieties of wood (1-2).

In his article, Calkin discusses many of the woods discussed by Ratner. Calkin claims that woods like mahogany and walnut are used for guitar bodies because they are easy to work with and are very pretty woods (2). He says that maple is used only for its appearance because different types of maple wood have varying and inconsistent qualities (3). The idea of tonewoods has been debated ever since certain woods were found to be tonewoods. Some people claim to hear a difference between woods, and some people claim that there is no difference. However, there is one widely accepted agreement between tonewood advocates and critics: the type of wood does somehow affect the overall quality of a guitar.

The fingerboard of a guitar is a roadmap for a guitarist’s hand. It is a long flat board imbedded with many metal strips called frets that separate different notes for each string, and on some guitars, the frets are “scalloped” which means that they are carved to form concave dips to make it easier to bend the strings