Knowing your guitar is key in being able to play it properly – it’s important that you practice a lot, but it’s also important that you spend enough time familiarizing yourself with the basic parts of the instrument, in order to know exactly how it functions.
The guitar can be divided into three parts – the head, neck, and body. Their purpose is as follows:
The head
The topmost part of the guitar, this is where the turning keys are located with the strings winding around them. You can turn these keys when you need to adjust the pitch of any string, and you’ll often find yourself doing that before playing.
The neck
Next up we have the neck – this is the long, sleek element that connects the head with the body, and the precise part where it connects with the head is called the “nut” – this is a groovy part, with each groove holding down the strings tightly.
Down along the neck we’ve got the fretboard – also known as the fingerboard. This is split into constant intervals by the frets. The frets are numbered, going from 1 to 20, and also have position markers – it’s important to press the strings on the frets in order to get the correct sound out of them.
The body
When you’re playing the guitar in a seated position, its body would typically rest on your knee or upper leg. The body is hollow, and basically consists of the soundhole, the pickguard, the saddle and the bridge. You pluck at the strings around the soundhole, and the saddle shapes the other end of the guitar where the strings end in.
The strings
The actual strings are the most important part of your guitar – a guitar normally has six of those, numbered 1-6, from thinnest to thickest correspondingly. This means that string number 1 would be the thinnest; another nomenclature for the strings is “E, A, D, G, B, e” which corresponds to the notes that they’re producing.
Now that you’re familiar with how your guitar is structured, let’s have a brief look at the process of tuning it.
Tuning a guitar
Tuning a guitar basically involves turning the keys in a manner that the notes produced by each string match the sound of your tuning instrument as closely as possible – as we mentioned above, you’ll want your strings to produce the E, A, D, G, B and e notes in this order. There are various ways to go about tuning a guitar – you can use a pitchpipe, an electronic tuner, or an electronic keyboard. The important thing is that you can compare the sound clearly. A pitchpipe is small and portable, and doesn’t cost much, but it’s not the most precise way to tune a guitar. An electronic tuner or an electronic keyboard may set you back significantly more, but it will give you an unmatched level of precision in the tuning of your instrument.
For acoustic or electric guitar lessons contact Glenn Sutton at: 619-306-3664.
