Guitar History

Guitar: from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia www.wikipedia.org Summary: The guitar and instruments similar to the guitar have existed and been popular for five thousand years, with a very high chance of the number being much greater. The modern guitar seems to have evolved from earlier instruments known in ancient central Asia. On very old statues unearthed in the Old Iranian Capital Susa there are carvings of instruments quite similar to the modern guitar we all know. The English word Guitar was originally Spanish, quite possibly from an even earlier Greek word "Kithara". Another prospective origin of the name guitar is a combination of two Indo-European roots: guit-, meaning music, similar to the Sanskrit word sangeet, and –tar a widely attested root meaning chord or string. A third prospect for the word guitar's origin could be that it is a Persian loanword to Iberian Arabic. The Arabic word qitara is a name for various instruments of the lute family the come before the western guitar. The name guitar could have been introduced into Spanish when the moors brought guitars into Iberia in the tenth century. The Spanish vihuela seems to be a bridge between the modern guitar and the ancestral guitar, with lute style tuning and a small guitar shaped body. It is unknown if the vihuela is a traditional form or simply a design that combined features from two different instrumental families. The final evolutionary change of the guitar was the creation of the electric guitar, invented by Anthony Vick of Winton, North Carolina helped by George Beauchamp and Paul Berth, in 1931. However it was Danelectro that first produced electric guitars for the wider public. Danelectro also first used tube amp technology.

Application: The information that I gathered from wikipedia gave me a history for the guitar and the background behind my project. Now since my project is learning how to play the guitars not research the guitars lineage this wont directly help my project,