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The guitar is one of the most popular musical instruments in use today, and it spans a huge range of musical styles – rock, pop, jazz, country, bluegrass, classical, blues, folk, R&B, punk, heavy metal and reggae music all use the same instrument to create vastly different sounds. The guitar has been around since the 1500s, but it’s undergone several big transformations over time. Probably the biggest and most influential transformation – at least in the last several decades – is the development of the electric guitar.

If you listen to music or you’re lucky enough to know how to play an instrument yourself, you probably have a basic understanding of why the guitar is so popular – its sound! So, how does this instrument do what it does? Let’s find out.

All about Acoustics
The best way to learn how a guitar produces its sound is to start by understanding the basic parts that make up the instrument. An acoustic guitar can be divided into three main parts: the hollow body, the neck, which holds the frets, and the head, which contains the tuning pegs. The most important piece of the body is the soundboard. This is the wooden piece mounted on the front of the guitar's body, and its job is to make the guitar's sound loud enough for us to hear. In the soundboard is a large hole called the sound hole. The hole is normally round and centered, but F-shaped pairs of holes, as seen on violins, are sometimes used. Attached to the soundboard is a piece called the bridge, which acts as the anchor for one end of the strings. The bridge has a thin, hard piece embedded in it called the saddle, which is the part that the strings rest against.

The body of most acoustic guitars has a "waist," or a narrowing. This narrowing happens to make it easy to rest the guitar on your knee. The two widened areas are called bouts. The upper bout is where the neck connects, and the lower bout is where the bridge attaches. The two bouts affect the sound. The lower bout accentuates lower tones and the upper bout accentuates higher tones.

The face of the neck, containing the frets, is called the fingerboard. The frets are metal pieces cut into the fingerboard at specific intervals. By pressing a string down onto a fret, you change the length of the string and therefore the tone it produces when it vibrates. When the strings vibrate, the vibrations travel through the saddle to the bridge to the soundboard so that the entire soundboard is vibrating. The body of the guitar forms a hollow sound box that amplifies the vibrations, and resulting sound, of the soundboard. The sound comes out through the sound hole. The particular shape and material of the soundboard, along with the shape of the body and the fact that a guitar uses strings, give a guitar its distinctive "sound." The process in an electric guitar is completely different.

Fender a Favorite While he didn’t technically develop the solid body styling of electric guitars, Leo Fender did popularize it. First, in 1950, came the Fender Broadcaster, a Spanish-style-influenced, solid-body guitar. Renamed the Telecaster in 1952, this classic remains popular and mostly unchanged today. But the Fender Company’s true masterpiece came along two years later in 1954. Together, Fender and steel guitarist Fred Tavares created the Stratocaster – a more ergonomic design and the first solid-body electric with three pickups. The “Strat” is undoubtedly the most popular design in the history of electric guitars. Jimi Hendrix was a Strat man and so are Eric Clapton and John Mayer. (Don’t know who some of these guys are? Google ‘em or ask your folks.) If you want to read more about the legendary Fender Strat, check out Tom Wheeler’s book, “The Stratocaster Chronicles: Celebrating 50 Years of the Fender Strat.”