THE GUITAR!

The guitar is a musical instrument with ancient roots that is used in a wide variety of musical styles. It typically has six strings, but four, seven, eight, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen and eighteen string guitars also exist.

GUITAR AS AN INSTRUMENT

Guitars are recognized as one of the primary instruments in flamenco, jazz, blues, country, mariachi, rock music, and many forms of pop. They can also be a solo classical instrument. Guitars may be played acoustically, where the tone is produced by vibration of the strings and modulated by the hollow body, or they may rely on an amplifier that can electronically manipulate tone. Such electric guitars were introduced in the 1930s and continue to have a profound influence on popular culture.

WHAT ABOUT TRADITIONAL GUITARS ?

Traditionally guitars have usually been constructed of combinations of various woods and strung with animal gut, or more recently, with either nylon or steel strings. Guitars are made and repaired by luthiers. There are many brands of guitars, but some commonly known brands are PRS, Gibson, Dean, Gretsch, Ibanez, Martin, Jackson, Schecter, and Fender.


3 DIFFERENT TYPES OF GUITARS .

Renaissance and Baroque guitars
These are the gracile ancestors of the modern classical guitar. They are substantially smaller and more delicate than the classical guitar, and generate a much quieter sound. The strings are paired in courses as in a modern 12 string guitar, but they only have four or five courses of strings rather than six. They were more often used as rhythm instruments in ensembles than as solo instruments, and can often be seen in that role in early music performances.

The modern Ten-string guitar
The Modern/Yepes 10-string guitar (a classical guitar) adds four strings (resonators) tuned in such a way that they (along with the other three bass strings) can resonate in unison with any of the 12 chromatic notes that can occur on the higher strings; the idea behind this being an attempt at enhancing and balancing sonority.

Archtop guitars
These are steel string instruments in which the top (and often the back) of the instrument are carved in a curved rather than a flat shape. Lloyd Loar of the Gibson Guitar Corporation introduced the violin-inspired f-hole design now usually associated with archtop guitars, after designing a style of mandolin of the same type. The typical archtop guitar has a large, deep, hollow body whose form is much like that of a mandolin or violin family instrument.

SOURCE : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar