The guitar has ancient roots going back thousand of years. Guitars are recognized as one of the main instruments in many types of music such country, blues, rock, and pop. They can also be solo classical instruments.

Guitars may be played acoustically, where the tone is produced by the vibration of the strings and regulated by the hollow body, or they may rely on an amplifier that can electronically regulate the tone.

Such electric guitars were ushered in during the 20th century and continue to have an important influence on pop culture.Traditionally guitars have usually been made of various woods and strung with animal gut, but more recently it's been either steel or nylon strings.

Guitars are made and repaired by people called luthiers.Before the evolution of the electric guitar and the use of man-made materials, a guitar was defined as being an instrument with a a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with curved sides.Instruments like the guitar have been documented for at least 5,000 years.

The classical six string guitar first showed up in Spain but was the product of a long history of various influences. Like almost all other stringed European instruments, the guitar can be traced back thousands of years.It is distantly related with contemporary instruments such as the Iranian tanbur and the Indian sitar.

The oldest known historical representation of an instrument displaying all the features of a guitar being played is a 3300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.The modern word, guitar, was translated into English from the Spanish word guitarra, which is derived from the Latin word cithara, which in turn was derived from the Greek word kithara.

The modern guitar was derived from the Roman cithara brought by the Romans to Hispania at about 40 AD. The Spanish vihuela, an isntrument with a guitar-like body, of the 15th and 16th centuries is usually considered the ancestor of the modern guitar. The vihuela's popularity only lasted a short period of times as it was replaced by the guitar.

The Vinaccia family of luthiers are known for developing the mandolin, and have been credited many times with having built the oldest surviving six string guitar. Gaetano Vinaccia with the date of 1779. has his signature on the label of a six string guitar built in Italy.

This guitar has been checked by experts and doesn't show signs of alterations from a double-course guitar even though fakes are known to exist.Modern proportions the classical guitar were instituted by Antonio Torres Jurado (1817-1892), during the the 1850s.

Torres and Louis Panormo of London were both responsible for presenting superiority of fan strutting over transverse table bracing.The electric guitar was patented by George Beauchamp in 1936.

Beauchamp co-founded the famous Rickenbacker guitar company which used the horseshoe-magnet pickup. However, it was Danelectro, an amplifier company, that first produced electric guitars for the wider public.

The rest as they say, is history...