Guitar: six immortal strings that touch the soul.

The world loves music. There is not a single soul on this earth who does not have a favorite song, artist, or genre. In my opinion, it is the most understandable art form on the planet: seven notes are all it takes, combined in just the right way, to transmit emotions like joy, harmony, anger, fear, or love, all without uttering a single word. The exact same thing certainly cannot be said about sculpture and painting, fields in which—especially over the last century—there are artists about whom, frankly, one understands absolutely nothing. Someone might counter that I am simply not an expert, but that is precisely the point: music does not need to be studied to create a profound connection with whoever is listening to it.

I have a beautiful relationship with music. It has accompanied me since I was born and has always supported me in every moment of my life, whatever my need might be. Therefore, it felt only right to somehow honor something that belongs to all of us in equal way and measure.

However, I did not want to celebrate music as an abstract concept. Also because I wouldn't really know what to write besides the classic "music is beautiful," which is certainly not enough for a blog post. So I asked myself: why not celebrate everything that makes it the most intimate and wonderful art form there is?

That is how this new section of my blog was born, a space entirely dedicated to everything music has to offer. And to begin, I decided to start not with an artist, but with a special instrument: the guitar.

I cannot explain exactly why I love it so much. Maybe it is because of that idea of "feeling" it carries with it, or maybe because it is the instrument that, better than any other, translates love and passion into sound. It is no coincidence that it is the absolute protagonist in flamenco or that, when you want to create a romantic atmosphere, a guitar in the background never misses the mark. Furthermore, if played well, it can truly be enough all on its own to bring a whole track to life (one need only think of Carlos Santana, who has been creating masterpieces for fifty years without needing to say a word).

The celebration of this instrument of love will be divided into multiple parts: we will see together what it is and how it is structured; we will retrace its historical evolution; and we will briefly recall the myths that made it great. Are you ready for this journey?

What is a guitar?

Apologies in advance for what you are about to read, but since this must be a complete post, I am obligated to include the official definition. If you exclaim, "Wow, Captain Obvious!" I understand you perfectly: it is the exact same feeling I had upon reading it.

So, the guitar is a stringed musical instrument that produces sound through the vibration of strings stretched over a resonant box or amplified electrically. Yes, feel free to shout "Captain Obvious" whenever you want! I understand you perfectly. The thing that makes me laugh the most, though, is that the guitar has another technical name, which is "chordophone."How many of you knew that? I certainly didn't! A decidedly strange term, don't you think? Honestly, I don't know if anyone in this world uses the word "chordophone." But it would be beautiful to go into a music shop (if they still exist), ask, "Hello, I would like to buy an electric chordophone!" and see the bewildered reaction of the guy or girl in the shop.

How is it made?

Here too we continue to walk the path of "We all know this already!" but let's go into a bit more detail.

Let's start with the main part, which is the body. It is simply the resonant box, made of wood, which acts as an acoustic amplifier (in classical and acoustic guitars) or as a simple support for the electronic components (in electric ones).

Attached to the box we find the neck, which is the long, thin part where you press the strings. This is the true soul of the guitar, because it is here that notes are created and a musician's skill is defined. Unlike the violin, whose neck is bare, the guitar's neck is not smooth and uniform but is divided by metal frets that create the spaces making up the fretboard. Each space between two metal bars (namely the fret) represents a specific note or its precise pitch. If on a keyboard you have white and black keys, on a guitar you have the spaces between two frets.

Depending on how you press the strings on the neck and the skill and speed of your fingers, timeless melodies can be created. If you don't use the neck as it should be used, what you get is a torture for the ears that turns love for music into deep hatred.

Above the neck, the strings are stretched. Usually there are six, but there are variants of guitars with 7, 8, or even 12 strings. In the traditional six-string guitar, each string plucked "open" (that is, without touching the fretboard) emits a specific note. Looking at them from top to bottom, the sequence is: E (low), A, D, G, B, E (high). The notes that the strings produce when played open move at regular intervals of fourths, except between G and B, where the distance shortens to a third.

This is the pattern:

From the 6th string (low E) to the 5th string (A): we count starting from E (1), F (2), G (3), A (4). The jump is 4 notes.

From the 5th string (A) to the 4th string (D): we count starting from A (1), B (2), C (3), and D (4). The jump is 4 notes.

From the 4th string (D) to the 3rd string (G): we count starting from D (1), E (2), F (3), and G (4). The jump is 4 notes.

From the 3rd string (G) to the 2nd string (B): we count starting from G (1), A (2), B (3). From the 2nd string (B) to the 1st string (high E): we count starting from B (1), C (2), D (3), and E (4). The jump goes back to being four notes.

This little "anomaly" is the true stroke of genius by the luthiers (those who build guitars): it serves to save the fingers from unnatural acrobatics, allowing one to take the most complex chords and the dreaded barre chord while following the natural anatomy of the hand. If this clever trick were not used, we would have no guitarists, because it would be impossible to play a guitar without breaking one's fingers.

Finally, we have the headstock, which is located at the terminal part of the neck. It is that part where those little white or metal pegs are, which you turn. This is a critical component of the guitar, because it houses the tuning pegs necessary to tune the instrument. Strings, in fact, tend to loosen over time and with use, losing the intonation they are designed for. It therefore becomes fundamental to adjust their tension through those pegs on the headstock to ensure that they always sound exactly as they should. Because there is nothing more nerve-wracking than an out-of-tune guitar.

How it produces sound.

I know, here too we are talking about the obvious, but it is right to have this type of paragraph if we want the post to be truly complete. In principle, playing the guitar is simple: the musician plucks the strings using their dominant hand, helping themselves with their fingers or with a plectrum (a small piece of plastic, a pick).

How do you choose between the pick and fingers? Well, it depends a lot on how you feel more free and, above all, on what you want to play. If the goal is a harmonic and structured piece, in which you touch one string at a time in a rapid manner, both solutions are excellent, since both fingers and the pick allow you to move with great precision to create complex melodies. Here it is just a matter of convenience. If, instead, you want to strum a rock or metal piece, banging hard on the chords (thus involving all six strings at the same time), the pick becomes the best choice: doing the same thing directly with your fingers, in the long run, could be decidedly painful!

The other hand—the left for right-handed people or the right for left-handed people—instead presses the strings on the fretboard. This gesture serves to change the length of the part of the string that vibrates, consequently modifying the pitch of the note: the more the string is pressed in the frets closer to the body (therefore moving down along the neck), the "shorter" its vibrating portion becomes, and the higher the final sound will be.

Main types.

There are hundreds of guitars of different shapes and sizes on the market, each capable of producing a different tonal nuance. There are even artists or enthusiasts who buy them just to collect them, and some historical models have become so iconic that they are worth millions of dollars. However, to put things in order, the entire global production can be summarized into just three big categories. Yes, you read that right: only three.

The classical guitar is the "eldest" of the family. It has strings strictly made of nylon, which give it a soft, sweet, and warm sound. In this case, the sound propagates in a completely natural way, amplified solely by the wooden soundbox. The big pro and con are that not having the possibility to be connected to an amplifier, the classical guitar creates a very "intimate" sound, excellent for playing in a small place. But due to the fact that the soundbox is not that powerful, it is not the ideal choice in concerts, unless a microphone is used. It has always represented the ideal starting point for anyone who decides to start studying music. I, too, in middle school, used the classical guitar to learn how to make music. It's too bad only that I abandoned it way too quickly. Unfortunately, when you are forced as a teenager and you don't find the right teacher, you lose interest quickly.

The acoustic guitar is the more modern variant, almost the younger sister. At first glance it may look identical to its classical relative, but it hides enormous differences. In the first place, the strings are made of metal (usually steel and bronze), a characteristic that produces a much more brilliant, bright, and powerful timbre, perfect for genres like pop, folk, and country. Furthermore, many models offer the possibility to be plugged directly into an external amplification system to be able to be used in concerts or in very large venues.

The electric guitar is the youngest version and, without a doubt, the most famous and iconic one. Here we must start from a fundamental concept: it does not possess a deep soundbox. Consequently, without an external amplifier, there is no music; if played while unplugged, the only sound heard is that of the friction with the pick. But how does it transmit sound? It uses magnetic sensors called pickups, mounted inside the small "body," which are capable of transforming the vibrations of the metal strings into electrical signals, which are then sent to the amplifier via a cable. It is the undisputed queen of rock, blues, and metal.

History.

Finally, we are at the part of the post that interests me the most. I always take great pleasure in learning new things when I write the history of things and people. The history of the guitar is a journey thousands of years long, crossing continents and cultures and evolving from simple rudimentary instruments created with whatever was found to unique design pieces tied hand in glove with rock icons.

Ancient Origins: Ancestors and Luthiers.

The birth of stringed instruments has ancient origins. We have to go back in time a few thousand years, approximately over 4,000 years ago.

We are in the period of ancient Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, where great civilizations like the Sumerians and the Babylonians were taking the first steps of human history. In that grandiose era, music was not just a pastime but a pillar of court entertainment and, above all, of sacred prayers.

It is precisely in this cradle of civilization that the first prototypes of instruments equipped with a neck and a resonant box appear (often made from turtle shells or hollowed-out gourds). The oldest "guitar-like" instrument that has reached us completely intact belonged to Har-Mose, an Egyptian court singer who lived about 3,500 years ago, buried with his beloved three-stringed instrument and a resonant box made of cedar wood.

Only later, in ancient Greece, did the decisive steps regarding the vocabulary begin to be made, even though the connection is not very clear. It is true that the term we use today—the kithara (or cithara)—was coined, but the Greek cithara was actually a different instrument—closer to a small square harp without a neck that was rested against the chest.

Only through the Latin "cithara" and subsequent linguistic variations did this ancient name travel through time until turning definitively into the word we use today: "guitar," tied to the instrument we use today.

Although the guitar as the instrument we know did not exist in ancient kingdoms, there were musicians in tunics plucking large and majestic wooden citharas, laying the theoretical foundations of music (and vocabulary) that, many centuries later, would give life to our guitar.

The Middle Ages

It is during the Middle Ages that we begin to see something that truly resembles our guitar, and not just as a matter of name. The crucial turning point occurs starting from the 8th century with the Arab expansion into the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain). The Moors brought with them an extraordinary musical culture and, above all, the oud (the Arabic lute). This instrument, characterized by a body shaped like a half-pear and a short neck, quickly became incredibly popular.

Over the centuries, the oud began to blend and dialogue with the musical traditions of Christians and European culture. From this historic "cultural shock," two distinct instruments were born in Spain, which the musicians of the time clearly differentiated and which we even find illustrated in famous medieval manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria:

The Moorish Guitar (Guitarra Morisca): A direct descendant of the oud, it had a rounded body, multiple strings, and a harsher, typically oriental sound.

The Latin Guitar (Guitarra Latina): Developed by European artisans, it featured a flat body and, for the first time, sides slightly curved inward, drawing that typical "figure eight" shape that anyone today would associate with a guitar.

This cultural melting pot transformed Spain into the true cradle of the instrument, setting the foundation for the centuries to come.

Renaissance and Baroque: The Vihuela and the Baroque Guitar.

Between the 14th and 16th centuries, evolution takes an extraordinary leap forward. Still in Spain, two key instruments develop that represent the foundations of the guitar we love and play so much today.

The Vihuela (Vihuela de mano): It becomes the main instrument of the Spanish Renaissance. It had a refined "figure-eight" shape, a flat back, and six mounted double strings (technically called "courses"), tuned in unison or in octaves. The vihuela was an elite instrument, extremely popular among nobles, sovereigns, and court musicians. To give you an idea of its importance, composers of the time wrote music for the vihuela using tablature (a visual system ancestor of modern tabs on the internet), and its melodies were considered just as sophisticated as those of the lute in the rest of Europe.

The Renaissance and Baroque Guitar: Almost simultaneously, the guitar proper makes its appearance. Smaller and narrower compared to the vihuela, it initially mounted only 4 courses, which then became 5 in the Baroque period (17th century). At the beginning, it was not considered a "noble" or academic instrument but was the instrument of the people par excellence: cheap, light, and perfect for accompanying songs in taverns and squares.

It is precisely in this period that the rasgueado is born, the typical technique of strumming or brushing with the fingers across all the strings at once to give the rhythm, which would become the trademark of Spanish music. The success of the 5-course baroque guitar was so overwhelming that in 1596 the Spanish doctor Joan Carles Amat published the first treatise in history entirely dedicated to this instrument, marking the exact moment when the guitar began to surpass the old and complex medieval lutes in popularity.

The Nineteenth Century: The Modern Guitar is Born.

The 19th century is the era of the true turning point. Although the piano had ruled supreme in previous centuries, the guitar finally takes that evolutionary step necessary to arrive at the instrument we know today. The instrument definitively abandons double strings in favor of six single strings, adopting the classic E-B-G-D-A-E tuning that we still use right now.

The man who can be considered the true "father" of the modern guitar is the Spanish luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado (and yes, Spain confirms itself once again as the absolute protagonist). Torres radically modified the design of the era: he widened the soundbox, made the wood of the soundboard thinner to improve resonance, and introduced fan bracing inside the box. What on earth is this fan bracing? Fan bracing consists of gluing a fan-like array of wooden struts inside the soundbox, arranged exactly like an open fan. This innovation allowed the instrument to withstand greater string tension and, at the same time, offered a much more powerful, rich, and deep sound.

From this moment on, the classical guitar takes on the shape and proportions that we all know. Now I perfectly understand why this instrument is so viscerally loved in Spain. The guitar was effectively born and raised in Spain and became an adult there. It is completely natural that for Spaniards it is such a dear and identity-defining object

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The Twentieth Century: Steel and Electricity

In the 20th century, music changes radically, and the guitar feels the need to make itself heard, especially within the big American bands where the soft timbre of nylon is punctually drowned out by the power of brass instruments (trumpets and trombones).

Thus, right in the early years of the 1900s, the acoustic guitar was invented. In the United States, historic brands like Martin introduce steel strings and the iconic "Dreadnought" design (a much larger and deeper body). It is the birth of the perfect sound for blues, folk, and country, genres that would define the musical culture across the ocean even before the advent of rock, pop, and, in more recent times, rap and hip-hop.

However, the main problem in that period always remained the same: volume. In large, crowded spaces or noisy venues, even the acoustic guitar struggled to make itself heard, keeping in mind that blues and jazz had a predominance of brass.

It was between the 30s and 50s that the electric revolution swept over the instrument in an irreversible manner. To solve the problem of amplification once and for all, the first magnetic pickups were applied inside the bodies, capable of capturing vibrations and connecting the instrument to loudspeakers. The first historical step takes place in 1931, the year in which Rickenbacker's "Frying Pan" is born, the very first amplified electric guitar in history. However, these were still guitars with a resonant box.

The definitive consecration arrives, however, in the 1950s. Legendary pioneers like Leo Fender (with the Telecaster and Stratocaster models) and Les Paul (with the homonymous guitar by Gibson) decided to eliminate the hollow soundbox entirely, giving life to the solid-body guitars we still use today. This brilliant intuition completely zeros out the annoying feedback squeals at high volume, unleashing all the power of the rock 'n' roll sound that would revolutionize the decades to come.

But why is the guitar so shamelessly loved?

If you look around, the guitar is everywhere; it is the most sold, most played, and most loved instrument on the planet. But why specifically her? Why not the piano, the violin, or the saxophone?

Honestly, as a simple listener, my answer is that the secret of the guitar lies in a single, beautiful word: democracy. The guitar is the most democratic instrument that exists on Earth, and it succeeds in this for a series of reasons that have nothing to do with musical theory but very much with our everyday life.

Let's tell the truth. If you try to play the violin for the first time, the only thing you will get will be a sound similar to a cat whose tail has been stepped on. The piano, on the other hand, requires you to know how to read two musical clefs at the same time and turns your brain into mush after two minutes. The guitar, instead, is welcoming; it loves you right away. With just four basic chords—which anyone can learn on the sofa in a couple of afternoons—you are already capable of strumming and accompanying hundreds of famous songs. It gives you immediate gratification.

As much as the piano is a wonderful instrument, try bringing it to a picnic, a barbecue, or to the beach in front of a bonfire. The guitar (especially the classical or acoustic) you just grab, load into the trunk, and it's done. Furthermore, it has this almost magnetic magical power: all it takes is for someone to hint at a chord progression, and, within three seconds, everyone around starts singing and forming a circle. It is the instrument of sharing par excellence.

The guitar is intimate. You are not sitting on a stool in front of a piece of wooden furniture. You literally have to embrace the guitar to play it. The soundbox is rested directly against your chest, and when you pluck the strings, you physically feel the vibrations of the wood against you, on your skin. An intimate and visceral relationship is created between the body and the instrument, as if it were an extension of your arms.

And it is universal. No other instrument manages to jump from one genre to another with such a cheeky casualness. Feeling romantic and a bit melancholic? Classical guitar. In the mood for rhythm, travel, and the open air? Acoustic guitar. Have you accumulated anger and stress and want to make the walls of your house shake? Plug the jack into the electric guitar, turn the distortion up to max, and molest the neighbors. The guitar knows how to be exactly everything you need at the exact moment you are feeling it.

The guitar never plays the schoolteacher and doesn't ask you for a conservatory diploma to let you have fun. It welcomes you just as you are, whether you want to become the new Carlos Santana or you simply want to forget a bad day while humming a song on the couch. And that is why, in the end, we all love it so much.

Small Reflections.

And here we are at the end of this long and fascinating journey. If you think about it, it is incredible how a "simple" piece of wood with six strings—or a solid block full of magnets and circuits—managed to cross four thousand years of history, wars, migrations, and cultural revolutions to become the instrument that everyone today has, at least once, dreamed of holding.

From the prayers of court singers in ancient Egypt, passing through the intuitions of Spanish luthiers who designed its soul and curves, all the way to the American workshops where it was literally "plugged into the current," the guitar confirms itself for what it is: the official translator of our deepest emotions. You don't need to be a music expert, you don't need to know how to read super complicated sheet music, and you don't even need to know how to play it like Carlos Santana to love it. It is enough to know how to listen and let yourself be carried away by a sound that transmits emotions that touch the heart and the mind straight.

M.