Did you know that…..
The origins of the guitar can be traced back as much as 4000 years.
The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument
displaying the essential features of a guitar is a 3,300 year old stone
carving of a Hittite bard.
The modern word, guitar, was adopted into English from Spanish guitarra.
The guitar is descended from the Roman cithara brought by the Romans to Hispania around 40 AD.
The 12 string guitar usually has steel strings and rather than having
only six strings, the 12-string guitar has six courses made up of two
strings each. The highest two courses are tuned in unison, while the
others are tuned in octaves.
The guitarrĂ³n is a very large, deep-bodied Mexican 6-string acoustic
bass played in mariachi bands. It is fretless with heavy gauge nylon
strings.
Electric guitars can have solid, semi-hollow, or hollow bodies.
The first guitarist of note to use a seven-string guitar was jazz
guitarist George Van Eps, and that Solid body seven-strings were
popularized when Ibanez Guitars released the Ibanez Universe guitar,
endorsed by Steve Vai.
In 1982 Uli Jon Roth (Original guitarist for the Scorpion’s)
developed the “Sky Guitar”, with a vastly extended amount of frets. It
was the first guitar to venture into the upper registers of the violin.
Roth’s 7-string and 33 fret “Mighty Wing” guitar features an altogether
6-octave range!
The guitar is a transposing instrument. Its pitch sounds one octave lower than it is notated on a score.
Eric Clapton’s favorite guitar (named “Blackie) was at one time the
most expensive guitar ever sold. It was bought for $950,000 USD in 2004
by a guitar archaeologist. It became the 2nd most expensive guitar in
the world when its predecessor sold at an auction in Doha, Qatar on
November 16th, 2005 for $1 million dollars! The Strat was signed by
several rock musicians to benefit a tsunami charity, ‘Reach out to
Asia’. It was bought by Qatar’s royal family for a million US dollars
and donated back to the Asia Program, bringing in $2.7 million US
dollars at the more recent auction. In all, the guitar has generated a
total of $3.7 million US dollars, making it the most expensive guitar
yet.
So after all this, I must ask….. Why haven’t YOU decided to get started playing guitar!?
Are you going to wait for another 4,000 years to pass before fulfilling that desire you have had to learn how to play this awesome instrument?
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