We got something really cool for the channel today. We got Brandon Aker here, back. Our friendly neighborhood stringed instrument historian. For this video, we're going to go through the history of the guitar, where the guitar came from, and how we got to what we know and love today.
Seven checkpoints along the way of the history of the guitar starting in the 15th century. Snapshots through time towards the evolution to the guitar. And we get to play all of them as well.
And we're gonna jam on all of them. No stairway. Oh man.
As far back as we can go, where did the guitar come from? The guitar is a member of the lute family. The oldest member of the lute family comes from 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. There's this instrument called the tambour, which is still played today. Around 3100 BCE, they discovered this instrument called the tambour.
And there's actually tons of instruments from ancient civilizations, like in Central Asia, in Egypt, and in Mesopotamia, where they were playing these lute-like instruments. You can see them in sculptures, in paintings, in artwork. That brings us to actually ask the question, what is a guitar?
Yeah, what's a guitar? And which one of these ancient ancestors, you know, eventually turns into the guitar? Unfortunately, we're not gonna be able to solve that one today.
For the sake of this video, what's important is that there are many instruments, like lyres, which are harp-like instruments, as well as tambours, kitaras. The first thing we can call a guitar doesn't come around until around 1500. And where does that name even come from? There's a lot of theories about that. There's an instrument called a tar.
For example, and I think tar actually just means like string. Car tar, I think, or something like that. And car is for, and tar is string.
So it's like four string instruments. Depending on the number of strings, it'll have a different name. These instruments come from the chordophone family.
And when you give something a name like chordophones, what's a chordophone? Chord is Greek for string, and phonos is Greek for sound. String instruments that make sounds.
Yeah. Chordophones. Boxes with strings on them. Yeah.
I have picked an instrument today. To start with, which I think is the one that we can say, this one for sure, at least, gets us towards the path of the guitar. And which one is that? The Arabic oud, this beautiful instrument.
Got a teardrop shape, a big bold back, with individual strips of what we call ribs. These are heated up and bent, that's how you get the wood bent. A short neck, cool bent back peg box with these violin-like friction pegs. Yeah, that's a serious angle there. Yeah.
Each string is doubled, there are 11 strings total. And what year was this invented? So I don't know the exact year that this was invented, but it comes from... Yeah, I imagine you don't have the patent.
This instrument has gone back in time for thousands of years. It comes from the very ancient instrument called a barbat. The first iterations only had four strings, and over time they added more and more until we end up with 11, and sometimes I think they even have 13. This is still really popular today, especially in places like Turkey and the Middle East and North Africa. This instrument is played all over the place.
The reason I'm starting with this one is because historically, we know... how this was brought to Europe and the chain of events that occurred that led to the guitar. This is the great-great-great-grandparent, maybe.
Yeah. Of the guitar. And it's pretty much played like a guitar, you know, they even play with a plectrum. Oh, I was wondering what that is. Yeah.
This is made of plastic, but traditionally the plectrum would have been made of wood or even like an eagle's quill. You open your hand and you put your pinky around it, and then you hold it between these two fingers. So it's like that. Use a lot of wrist to really dig into the string to get a good resonant tone. So the tuning is C, F. A, D, G, C. Okay, there's a little bit of that that I recognize.
Totally. Yeah. Because it's tuned in fourths. With one major third.
F to A is a major third. Everything else is a fourth. That's a guitar, right?
The thing that really drove me to be infatuated with this thing is the fact that it has no frets. Yeah. The reason that this instrument needs to be fretless is because Arabic music especially uses scales called makams. Those scales have notes in them that don't exist in the Western scale.
They're in between. are 12-tone Western system of semitones. Without frets, that means you can get all those spicy in-between notes. The octave split into 12 semitones, was that the average? In the West, it was.
Yeah, it was at that time? This classification of the church modes that we've heard about in music theory, for example, is basically a way of breaking the octave into 12 even steps. So in the West, that's a very old idea, and that's how music has worked since.
In the East, it kind of took a different path. There's these cool notes I learned about called half flats. We have like A, A sharp, B. They have...
A, Bb, and there's a Bb in between. Here's an A. That's about a Bb, a western Bb, semitone.
Here's a half flat. Apparently what region you come from changes how flat that half flat is. It's hard for me to learn, well how flat is it if it's just kind of in the middle?
So that's one of the biggest challenges. I've got just enough so we can at least hear the. Something like that. Awesome. Yeah.
That's the music you would have been hearing at that time. Yeah. You could really see how the fretless is absolutely necessary for that.
Totally. Those little ornaments, the sliding thing is so cool. But we can see where the guitar is starting to form. Can I play it?
Yes, you can play it. Alright, thanks. I'll be careful.
Wrap your pinky around it. Okay, and now just grip it between your thumb and index finger. So your thumb is there. And then you can wrap your arm around. And really, all wrists and arms.
I love that it's got this low string. Yeah, the low C is cool. Going right for the thirds, wow that's great. Yeah.
This is mainly a melodic instrument. Without the frets, it really is hard to play chords in tune. So you don't have to worry so much about that. It mainly plays melodies.
So not so much. You can do that, but it's very advanced. It's a little tough.
There's also no markers to where the notes would be. You use your ear. Yeah.
Ear plus muscle memory. This pick is really... because it's so close to what I'm used to, but not quite.
It's really... It took me a minute too. Nice. I love that, what you were doing earlier. We're so used to doing maybe like a little trill, like a little cut and cut.
But the fact that you can do all those little slidey things are... It's just really characteristic of the music. Yeah. Where are you plucking? Like right here?
Right here? I think over this this extra piece of wood here is essentially a pickguard. Oh yeah of course. Something like that.
Having six pairs of strings almost, it makes me want to just go right to the chords and like here's an E everybody. How beautiful this tiling. Look at these different pieces of wood for each millimeter around the entire thing.
It kind of does look at the top similar to the fretboard that I'm used to but so microtonal. In the inside the label is great to look at. Oh, and it comes with his picture on it too?
Yeah, yeah. And his email? This sound we're hearing, especially with these specific scales, was in the ears of people, especially in places like Persia.
This is still played in popular music, so it's incredible that this has lasted so long, but later would branch off into something else. Should we talk about how that happened? Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, we're only on the first one and already I feel like I could be here all day trying to figure out how to play this. That's going to be the trap of the day is how do we go to the next one?
If we fast forward a bit, in the year 711... The Moors invade Spain, and they bring with them the oud. And apparently the Spanish must have been really infatuated by the instrument because they kind of stole it and made it their own, the lute, and play it kind of like the oud for hundreds of years through the medieval period.
They kept the pick. They took the gut strings they were using, because remember... This would have been gut strings. These are modern strings right now. They're metal wound and some nylon.
But at the time, it would have been gut, which is, remember, animal intestine, usually sheep intestine. And what the Europeans did was they took those strings and they tied them around. to fix the pitches so you can play chords and you're also now you're fixed into the western tonal system right so i have a lute now we're into the 1500s yeah and so now we are into the 1500s in the renaissance the same concept the double stringing and this is seven pairs this one has seven medieval lutes would have had just four or five pairs but again they still played them with the pick and it kind of still sounds more or less like a nude by the end of the 15th century You get this, which is usually a six-course lute.
This one has seven, which they added later, and over time they just kept adding basses. More and more and more. Why was that the norm to have pairs of strings?
One of the reasons, especially in the bass register, is that when you play a gut string, where the string is only this long, the note sounds a bit flubby, it's a little long. By adding an extra octave, a high G and a low G, it makes it sound like a louder, more punchy version of that G. They weren't very bright.
Like the steel strings we know, of course, have a very bright sound. Well, the gut is actually a bit brighter than nylon. Really?
Yeah, but not as bright as steel. But I think another reason for the double strings is it also gives you a chorus effect. You know, when you have one singer sing versus two singers sing, they're never exactly in tune, and it creates a thicker sound.
One time, for just an experiment, I took off all the double strings on this lute just to see what it sounded like, and it sounded awful. It just lost all of its resonance. Have you ever heard the term sympathetic resonation? Yeah.
When you play one note and then stop it, you can actually tell that all the other strings are vibrating even if they're not touched. And that adds in like a built-in reverb to the instrument. Exactly.
And the more strings you have, the more sympathetic resonation you get. That's a big part of like the sitar, for example, like it has a ton of strings on it that you don't play. You can, but they're mainly just there to vibrate along with you.
It's like a built-in like really beautiful reverb. They always kept the first string single. The chanterelle, which means the singing string, was often single. It allows the melodies to be...
a little bit more clear. Seven sets of strings. Correct. With the top one on its own.
Correct. And how is this tuned? It's like a guitar with a capo on the third fret. It would become G to G.
Okay. If we forget about the sixth chorus, because the earliest Renaissance lutes, which is what we can call this, didn't have the seventh string. Fourths with one third, but the third's in a different place.
So we get G, C, F, A, D, G. There are some shapes where you can do guitar-like chords, and it works. D major. That's a D major shape. On this would be a C major chord.
The shapes aren't so unfamiliar. No, but they're just one string up. So this is the first one where just like that, if I picked it up and did my regular guitar thing, here's a C major, it would work. You could figure it out. It wouldn't be a C major, but it would work.
This instrument's heyday was really the 16th century. It existed in the 15th century as well, but the 16th century is really when this instrument was popular. This instrument was played by kings, queens, It was used during Shakespeare plays. It was even played by common people.
Eventually they dropped the pick, but they kept their hand position like this. And the reason they dropped the pick was because in the Renaissance you have the birth of polyphony, when you have many different parts which are independent melodies that occur at the same time and they weave together to create wonderful harmony. But with a pick, you can only really play, you know, one line at a time and maybe you can strum chords.
But you can really only successfully play... It's starting to sound like a guitar. They figured out that if you drop the pick and use your fingers, you can play several different voices at the same time. Because your thumb can play one part, and your fingers can play a different part.
The most famous piece for the Renaissance lute is probably by this English composer named John Dowland. And he wrote this piece called the Lacher Mephavan, which he later wrote lyrics for with a singer, and it's called Flow My Tears. Polyphony.
Was this normally played in a band with other instruments? Was this a solo instrument? Both. All across the board. There's an amazing literature of music for just a solo lute with voice.
This is the original singer-songwriters at the time, right? This is also kind of the era where secular song starts to become really popular. In the medieval period, mostly sacred music, religious music, right? Yeah. So these songs like Flow My Tears is about sadness and grief, not about religious connotation or something.
So the birth of secular music becomes very popular with... especially lute music, troubadour songs, stuff like that. So for this, I mean, we're going back so far that if you were making music, it was probably for the church. So at the time, was it rebellious to go to a concert? Maybe that's still the case, but to go to see music, but just to see music, that was a different thing?
It was definitely a different thing. They were exploring a very human... Emotion, you know, blow my tears, fall from your springs, exiled forever let me rest.
It's like, it's just like, it's so dark. The teenagers were just really sad. Yeah, it's pretty emo actually. Is like popular music mostly sad?
No, John Donlan was kind of the king of writing melancholic music, although he wasn't a very sad person. Turns out he was actually a spy. That's the thing about loop players, it's pretty cool.
Not they're spies? Yeah, really. Loot players had the positions and they had the ear of the king.
Like they could sometimes, their best position you can have as a loot player would be to serenade the king to sleep because it's so charmingly soft. They had positions at court. You can hear the king speak.
You might hear some gossip. And so actually loot players were often spies. Whoa. So don't tell me any of your secrets.
It's hilarious that there was a job to serenade the king to sleep. Isn't that great? I guess we do that.
now I often have my phone and I'll put on some music if I'm going to sleep. I guess if you were rich enough at the time, you would hire someone to do that for you. What a weird position. It is a very delicate, soft sound, but rather than thinking of it as a defect, it has a charm.
Because I would think that these instruments at the time would be made to be louder because, of course, this is way before amplification, but this is playing at about speaking volume. If the instrument's too loud, it overpowers the voice. So I can speak to you while I'm playing or sing, and the lute never overpowers me, which means it's a perfect accompaniment instrument.
Delicate. Yeah, it's beautiful. The piece that I played, Lacrime Pavane, how I played it was just the first level.
Any lute player worth their weight wouldn't just play that. On the repeat, they would add what are called divisions. Again, here's the simple version.
Again, already complicated, four voices, but with divisions. It becomes much more interesting. And you can improvise those in the spot.
Any lute player at the time would have been an amazing improviser. Another good riff I like is the ending melody. That can become...
What was being a full-time musician at this point like? Probably the best position that I know of that you could get was at courts. Because if your patron was royalty, you were paid well, you were taken care of. And that's essentially what you would have needed, was you would need patronage. This is later, but Bach, for example, had a very common job, which was music director at a church.
And so every week he had to write more music for the church. So all the strings so far would be animal intestine. As you saw with me having trouble with those thirds, we could take that same animal intestine we're using for the strings, wrap it around the fretboard, well, fingerboard, and make it a fretboard, yeah. We fixed the pitches. And by the way, there are some ancient instruments, like remember the ton board that I mentioned, that one from like 3100 Messamajig?
Yeah, did that one have frets? That one had frets. So the idea of frets wasn't a new invention for the Europeans.
It fit in with their musical system at the time. Here we have gut frets. These are real gut that I've tied around myself. Also this headstock is just really cool. From the Oud, remember, this is almost the same thing.
We have the teardrop shape. Now we get this beautiful decoration called the rose. We still have the bowl back and we still have the cool bent back peg box with all these friction pegs. We're way before gears. Those gear tuners didn't come around until I think something like 1820. So friction pegs were the deal.
And by the way, they're fine. Like if you have a good set of them, they work well. They can't microtune as easily as the gears can.
For people unaware, friction pegs, it's just held in there by friction of course. Yeah, you just push and turn and that's what keeps the string in. I mean, violins, that's what they still do today, right?
Because they held a pick like this and they would strum down and up, down is strong, up is weak, right? That's kind of natural effect you get rather than just... Which is a little bit not very musical. Unless you're playing thrash metal.
Right. Yeah! I mean it's telling too that that works on this instrument.
Right. Getting towards the guitar. Well, I'm not sure if that worked. It worked in me. They want to preserve this strong-weak idea, but still use the fingers.
So they use the thumb for down, and they use the index finger on the way up. Strong, weak, strong, weak. You get this fast way of playing down and up to play those divisions. So it's actually pretty...
Pretty fast. While you're playing fast you still get strong week, strong week, strong week, strong week. Which is very musical and perfect for the music of the time.
That's the basics of the renaissance flute. Yeah. Can we give it a try? Oh yeah!
I haven't prepared anything. You haven't read your treatises? No, I don't have any treatises with me. This feels like a guitar. Oh no, I'm so close!
Forget about this string, and you have a guitar. Oh, okay, alright. It's just down a whole step, so that's a B-flat major chord instead of a C major chord. Nice.
Melancholy. It would be down with the thumb and then up with the... Correct. The instrument's going to be more horizontal to the ground, and you come like this, and your thumb is underneath... Your index finger down with the thumb, up with the index finger.
But it's underneath it. Correct. Ooh.
All the paintings show them playing in this position. Jeez, yeah, that's really tough. Yeah. That's so different. Yeah.
I probably won't have time to nail that now. This goes down to... That's a low D. So imagine you take a standard guitar and you tune it down a whole step to D.
That's what that is. Ooh, whoa. Yeah, whoa.
Like it can sound so pretty and also sound so... Nice. That sounds awesome. Yeah.
Yeah. Whoa. It's very guitar-like.
Yeah. I mean, bar chord. Bam.
Totally. My muscle memory works. It's... Oh, we moved the fret there. Oh, oops.
Danger. Oh, I can't move my frets. That's different. This might seem like a disadvantage, but this is a huge advantage for these instruments, having movable frets.
So we can basically raise or lower different notes of that 12-tone system to be more in tune, to fine-tune more than a guitar with fixed frets. Yeah, that's a big part of the guitar that I learned through getting so frustrated with it while recording, is that guitars are just by their nature a little out of tune. They're equally out of tune. Yeah, they're equally out of tune.
Equal temperament. I remember recording and just thinking, my guitar is broken. Not every single fret on the fretboard is perfectly in tune.
I've got to bring it into a shop. But no, that's just what guitars are. The whole point is that you can play in every single key. You can play in C sharp minor and then go to E flat major and all those things will sound good. The only way temperaments work is if you make some keys sound good and some keys not sound so great.
Some chords sound great, beautiful, and some chords are very extra dissonant. So you're favoring certain notes. And then actually in the end, if you're sticking to one key, you can play much more in tune.
Much sweeter, especially major thirds are the big ones. Major thirds and equal temperament are super sharp. And with the movable frets, you're able to bring it into those different temperaments and have it be more perfectly in tune.
I often tune my guitars while recording a little bit differently so that they work for that one particular key. What I love about your first try of every single instrument I've ever shown you, Oh yeah. Even Classical guitarists who have a doctorate, they go to pick up a lute and they try to play one melody and you always go for the hardest thing and nail it!
Well I don't know if I nail it. There we go. It feels like I have a regular six string guitar where every string is doubled, so like a 12 string, and then another string on top. Yes.
And it's in a different tuning. Yes. The next instrument comes around 1500. This is lute-like.
It has double strings, friction pegs, gut frets, but now we've lost the teardrop shape. We've got an hourglass, which is reminiscent of a guitar, right? We have a flat back like a guitar.
Straight headstock, not the bent back headstock anymore. We have made it to our first ever guitar. So this is the Renaissance guitar.
Is this when they started using the word guitar as well? Yeah. This is 1500s.
We have the first guitar. Correct. And the tuning.
My dog has fleas. G-C-E-A. It's a ukulele.
That's where the ukulele tuning comes from. G-C-E-A. And the Portuguese in 1550 brought this to Hawaii.
And they later turned it into the ukulele. Right on! This instrument was really popular for strumming.
Much easier to manage chords as any uke player would know. We went from very nearly having the guitars tuning to changing it and then coming back to it later. I think the reason that this one kind of got demoted in terms of the number of strings is because when you have less strings, it's easier to form chords. With only one finger down, I can play a C major chord. Pretty easy.
And they thought the same thing. Some people even criticized this instrument as being too simple to play chords. But it's great for chords. It's very easy to strum, very easy to play songs and then self-accompany.
You could sing over that very easily. But they kept the chanterelle, they kept the double stringing, and they also developed a small solo repertoire for it. And there's a lot of beautiful pieces, especially from France.
What got them to this body shape, to this hourglass shape that we know? Was it because it could rest on your leg easier? You start seeing those hourglass shapes in the 1500s but it's a really good question as to What's the impetus behind the shapes of our instruments?
This of course makes sense because you just put it on your leg and you play it here. You can put it on your other leg and I pick up these and I don't really know how to hold it. Or simply that I just don't have any experience holding these. There's a reason for the bowl back. When you have a deep bowl, it often makes it so that you have a better bass.
And maybe there was something about the flat back and hourglass shape which produced an ideal sound for it. Yeah, maybe. There are different sizes by the way.
You can have slightly bigger and slightly smaller instruments. That's the basic Renaissance guitar. Wanna play it?
Yeah, I would love to. Why this change to this headstock and not this? As far as I know, the reasoning for the bent backward peg box, if you have seven doubled strings, that's a lot of strings, and if you just kept going farther away, you'd start reaching pretty far.
So by bending it back, you're able to easily access all of the tuning pegs. And with only a few strings, we don't need to bend it back because it doesn't go too far. Maybe that's one of the reasons. It's interesting. A lot of these conversations we're going to have today are partially...
Speculation. Yeah. I don't quite have that same technique you have. I use the like fleshy parts of my fingers.
I love your strum, it's great. What is that? I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. What am I playing there? I just stumbled upon it.
I didn't prepare anything. Yes! But yeah, that's just a ukulele.
Yeah. And still my guitar muscle memory works because I can play it just if I forget about the lowest two strings. Yes.
Imagine it's the top four strings of a guitar. Yep. One of the reasons also this is a guitar is because the top four strings... are proportionally the same.
If I just told you those were D, G, B, E, anything you played on it would be the same as you played on a guitar. I mean, again, I could be here forever. Well, should we keep going? Yeah, you should, you gotta stop me.
Okay. To get a larger range, they added a fifth... course to it and made it a bit bigger.
That brings us to the Baroque guitar. Yeah, we've already done a video on this guy. We'll link that somewhere. This is the gorgeous Baroque guitar. It was really popular between about 1600 to 1750, the Baroque period.
Now we've added a fifth course and the whole thing is tuned a fourth lower. We have E, B, G, D, A. Sounds like a guitar. Getting pretty close.
We just don't have a low E. We still have doubled strings. We still have the single chanterelle, but we've kept the The flat headstock. We've gained a mustache bridge, which I love so much. Remember this beautiful rose is now a three-dimensional decoration, which is made of goatskin.
Now that was very common at the time? Yeah, all different designs you can see by different makers. So it's like a branding thing. I think that's the idea. It's purely aesthetic, by the way.
This doesn't do anything for the sound, right? That's interesting because like now, like different brands differentiate themselves from the headstock. And this was kind of like that of the time. It's one of the distinguishing features.
We also have a flat back. Gut frets, friction pegs, all that's kind of the same. I did something on purpose in this video.
I took out the peg that we don't use. The tenth peg, which is actually, would have been a doubled version of the E, but since most of the time they use it as a chanterelle without the doubled string, it actually has nine strings and now there's no confusion. It is very cool that 400 years ago, if you were a guitar player, you played a nine string. Yeah, totally. The big appeal for the Baroque guitar was all the incredible sophisticated strum patterns that they developed.
But also could do plucking. Puntiato means plucking, raschiato means strumming. The puntiato sounds something like...
And the raschiato... Much louder, much deeper of a sound, kind of foreshadowing of flamenco. This instrument really blossomed in Spain. Other people in Europe called the music, the way they were banging on guitars at the time, the Spanish word, musica rodoso, which is I think like ridiculous music, or like loud, annoying music. It's hilarious to hear about that type of criticism of new music from 400 years ago.
Yes. loud and annoying. Yeah. There are five pairs of strings, except the top one's single. And the way you string the bottom two depends on which region you're in.
The D's could just be two high D's. No like a guitar D. And then the fifth string could also just have two high A's. So that's a very high tuning with no bass register.
Sometimes they added this low D that I have on here. And for this video, I decided, since I didn't have it last time, I added the low A. And this is the A of the guitar.
So actually if I play the single strings, A, D, G, B, C. There's our... We are very nearly modern guitar. We're just missing that low E. Now we're getting to the area where my muscle memory of a sixth string does me better than if I'm playing like a seventh string or an eighth string. Like this is almost, this feels closer.
To what I learned growing up with a six string guitar, the scale length of the instrument is very familiar. Yes, exactly right. Yeah.
Something pretty cool for more advanced guitar players out there. I'm sure you've run into this. Action problems on the guitar can happen when the weather changes. Yeah, that's a big...
because none of these have truss rods yet. Exactly. In modern guitars, there is a truss rod through the neck that you can adjust and it adjusts the bow of the neck.
It gets warped this way or this way. You can adjust that. None of these have that yet.
So you had to be really careful with these. If these got into some bad weather, that's it, right? There is an advantage with gut frets, by the way. Say, for example, you have a buzzy note.
You can just make the next note after it make a smaller fret, so there's more room. So by changing the frets, you can customize your setup. Every single fret can be a different size.
On a metal guitar, you have to literally file the frets down. So it's actually a little bit more convenient. Yeah, in some ways. Take one off and put a new one on. It's certainly far more modular.
The big part why we're still using gut frets here is simply because these materials didn't exist at the time. There's some instruments, early instruments, which started using types of metals for strings. Those wound strings that I was talking about, fully wound strings, didn't exist until into the, I think, the 18th century.
There was some, maybe the late Renaissance, they took a piece of gut and you could wrap it with a small piece of metal, like loosely wrapped, I think it's called a crimped string, just to give the string a bit more clarity. Actually using metal strings on the instrument, that's pretty... Pretty far off. Gut strings sound great. And most early Plex players today, even if you say, hey, I have some nylon strings that are cheaper and will last you longer, I say, I want those gut strings.
Well, not even because it's what they did. It sounds better. And of course they had metal at this time, but I imagine booting metal into the fretboard. would have been prohibitively expensive. And maybe they just didn't even want it.
If I had metal frets and I showed up to an early music gig, it starts like this. What temperament are we in? And I say, I'm an equal.
They would go... And I can't adapt, I can't change my notes. Now every single time someone plays one of those altered notes, I'm out of tune.
You have to be able to move your frets, otherwise you can't play the music. It's not like they were waiting, oh I can't wait till we can get rid of these gut frets, man. They were great.
So if you want to learn more about this one particular instrument, we got a whole video on it. Yes, we've arrived now in the 17th century and even into the 18th. So this instrument was being played a lot up until at least 1750. A new Italian style called galant music was emerging. It was a return to simpler music. In 1750, that's when Bach died, Bach's music is incredibly complex.
It's very contrapuntal, meaning there's a lot of separate voices weaving together. It's very sophisticated. In a reaction... to that sophisticated music, they started making this music which was a return to more similar charming melodies.
Very simple, beautiful melody with some basic accompaniment. And they wanted a better bass range. What's the trend so far?
Just keep adding strings! And so at the end of the 18th century, you start getting Baroque guitars like this, but with six courses, six pairs of strings. And then, at the beginning of the 1800s, we basically get a new instrument.
We have a six single string guitar tuned. E, A, D, G, B, E. And we made it. Yeah. So what year is this? Around 1800, we start seeing these six single string guitars.
But they're a little bit smaller than our current guitars, right? It kind of looks like a Baroque guitar. But we're there.
E to E, six strings, single strings. Totally. Let's see what's different than the Baroque guitar first. Of course, now we have a low E.
The double stringing, as I mentioned, was often to give the sound a bit of a louder sound, as well as in the... bass to clarify those low bass notes, which with gut is a little bit dull sounding. So with an upper octave you get more clarity. So now around the different strings.
Yes, I think around 1750 this guy in Naples, Stavorezze, invented the wound string. So he wound a metal around gut or sometimes silk and you get, when you do that, you get a really punchy loud bass sound. They abandoned the double string because they didn't need it anymore. And then they abandoned all the doubles and now you get six single strings which is. easier to tune and it's easier to do things like slurs and things on. In general, it's more convenient.
It's cheaper because you have less strings. For the early 19th century, it was the new trend. Yeah.
In 1750, we now have wound strings. Yes. It's a huge change to the sound. Yes.
Since we have metal wound strings, remember those gut frets that I told you no one was looking to replace them? Oh no, the metal wound strings keep ruining by chewing up all the gut frets. They experimented with many different materials, wood, and it ended up being metal that was preferred. I guess since the metal wound strings.
But there's a problem. If they're metal, you can't move them. So now we have to decide, okay, how are we going to temper them?
And equal temperament was the decision because you can play in every key and everything will sound pretty good. We have a smooth neck now. On these instruments, as you're playing through, you're also rubbing against the frets and sometimes moving them as well.
Okay, metal wound strings, though the top three, by the way, would still be gut in the 19th century. It's another big thing. Remember how I was emphasizing... on these other instruments, they only had like eight or so frets. Yeah.
This thing has 22 frets. It's a total shredder guitar. And they're on the fretboard, they're not on the body anymore. Exactly right.
The fretboard itself extends above the neck, and actually that's floating. I don't know if you can see, that's not touching the soundboard. Oh, just like a cello or... Yes.
You mentioned that these early guitars didn't have truss rods, which is right. So you can't make adjustments on the fly. Guess what? Does this have a truss rod in it?
It's not a truss rod. There's a mechanism here, comes with a clock key. You can put the clock key in and turn this and it changes the angle of the neck. Oh, that's one way around it. Yes.
So mid concert, if you're a little buzzy, you can go, right? And then you have a different action. This wasn't on every single 19th century guitar. This guitar specifically is a replica of a guitar from a very famous Viennese maker named Stauffer.
In places like Vienna, it was intense. They called it guitar mania. This just was the new thing.
If you're starting to learn with this, you also need to learn about temperaments. Yes. And tying on the frets and moving the frets to different temperaments.
This just bypasses all that. So it takes some pressure off. Yeah.
We still do have pegs. Because they don't have gears yet. Yeah, the gears come around 1820. I spoke earlier about this domino effect of, well, if you're gonna have metal strings, you need metal frets. Turns out there's other things that happen too.
This is called the pin bridge. With metal strings, you get more tension. And so you need a way of making sure this bridge doesn't rip off.
They drilled holes in the top. and the string actually goes through the hole and is held in place with these pins here. Yeah, that is exactly like a modern acoustic guitar. And I didn't even think about that with these other ones, but the bridges are so much different. They're just a tie-block bridge.
And that wouldn't work with metal strings. Pull-off. The tension's too great. Because it can handle more tension, and you can have more taut strings that are metal-wound, you also get more volume, and metal strings are more durable. Let's hear how this thing sounds.
It's a little guitar. It's the music of the time. In the 19th century we have a big stylistic change happening now. Each century has you know their trends and their different tastes in music. The favorite style of music in the 19th century in Europe was opera.
And so the popular tunes were themes from operas, right? You could walk away humming, oh yeah, they would only hear these tunes if they paid the ticket to see it. You can't go home and turn on Spotify and listen to that, your favorite song from the show you just saw. If you wanted to hear that song again, you had to go pay another ticket and go, which is cost prohibitive.
The way around that, to hear the song again, is to have composers take out those moments, fit them on instruments you can play at home. You have more amateurs playing music because they wanted to hear it. So you have more people playing at home, in the streets, in the bars, in whatever, in public forums. But you're right that the best level of music making only could be heard at those big platforms, like in an opera, or going to see a symphony orchestra play.
Because there's a big amateur market, you have a lot of people specifically writing pieces for them. But they can really manage, you know, really basic pieces that are... It's not very hard, but it's pretty.
Simple melodies with arpeggiations, and so that's what they were playing. This was also the time of incredible virtuosos. You wouldn't believe what they could do on the guitar. One of my favorite examples of this is this piece by the Spanish composer Fernando Sor.
He plucked a melody from a Mozart opera, from the Magic Flute. There's a melody in it that goes... And he fit it onto the guitar so you could play it at home. But he goes above and beyond.
He then makes a whole set of variations on the theme. When anybody just shows off what you can do on the guitar. And at the very end, he ends always in a very operatic way.
You can hear the operatic influence of the music, but he doesn't only just try to imitate the opera, he makes the guitar do what it does best using the idioms of the guitar. I just wanted to make that point earlier that it's not just an amateur market, although you have the birth of an amateur market for guitarists which never existed. Way more people playing guitar.
If you were a musician at the time, if you're a guitar player and you wanted to get your music out there, you have your live performances of course. So another avenue would be... Make music that's pretty easy to play on guitar but sounds great and then release the sheet music for it for other people to learn. Etudes, studies. Here check it out see what you can do.
I mean at this point like me getting the guitar and learning how it works is there's no this is just a guitar. Yeah there's no learning how it works. Small differences I mentioned, how will that change the way you play it?
Yeah, it does sound quite a bit different. I'm playing something that I would normally play on a steel string and it's really not working on this one as much. Softer, more mellow sound, I think. Oh, the fretboard is a little bit thinner than I'm used to. It's thinner and shorter.
And also, still no dots. I put one piece of tape for you. Yeah, one piece of tape works on seventh fret. When did we get dots? The whole idea of a marker is something hot and just burn the wood at spots to make a marker.
So anyone can do that. I think probably not until the late 19th century, early 20th century, do you get standard... Dots on 3, 5, 7. I don't see that on any classical guitars. Although on my classical guitar I requested when I had it built for me a 7th fret dot. When you're on stage and it's dark and you have to make a big shift and you look down, you know, whether you missed the note could be for that reason.
Modern guitars too, the dots are glow in the dark. Like that's become, well, like it's super blatant. I've been told for classical guitars that they don't have dots on them because players would use capos a lot.
So you're always changing the key. That's a good point. And then if you're playing with a capo in different places all the time, then the dots would be confusing rather than helping you. I've seen you do it like this.
That's the classical vibrato. Yeah. There you go.
That's great. It works best on the 12th fret. I've never really done that before. But it works surprisingly well. That's the beautiful one, especially in the halfway point, the string is the most loose, right?
So it's easier to move around. So we have a softer, more mellow sound. Now all of a sudden we have 22 frets. Almost added another octave.
Yeah, a lot of people say things like, yeah, but you probably never used these. Oh, they did. They go all the way up to the top. And it's such a beautiful extension of the register of the guitar. These notes would have been brand new.
This is quite the development. So if we go to the next level here, from the 19th century, in the mid-19th century, we have some new developments in the guitar. If you remember from our conversation with Marshall and Richard Bernay, they introduced us to a $275,000 guitar. A Torres guitar. A Torres guitar.
Torres was famous for taking this 19th century smaller guitar with ladder bracing. He enlarged the body and the depth. He came up with a new way of bracing the top, the wood underneath, with a system called fan bracing.
These new dimensions he added to the instrument codified the new style of guitar making for the rest of the classical guitar's life all the way up until now. So if we look at how small this guitar is, around 1850 we have this new codified shape. And now we're on a classical guitar. This is our classical guitar. Every classical guitar you see, if you meet someone and say, I play classical guitar, their guitar is going to look more or less exactly like this.
And Torres was responsible. for codifying these dimensions. We have a big body, it's a bit deeper.
Yeah. Right? It produces more sound. It's bassier. We still have, of course, the metal frets.
And here now, finally, are our gears. Finally, our gears. We can fine-tune on such a small scale.
I don't have to worry about pegs slipping or anything like that. Friction pegs, of course, it's just one-to-one. If you turn it all the way through once, it goes all the way through once. And on here, you can have one turn be a much smaller incremental change, and I can do a lot more fine-tuning. Was having a gear of this size cost prohibitive to have on something like that?
It wasn't invented until... I mean it became popular in 1820, it started to be used, but I'm not sure if it was even invented before. This is a complex like clock mechanism.
As far as I know, this just simply didn't exist until the early 19th century. As we learned with the Torres guitar, these were handmade. These were...
Very expensive. Yes. What we hear now is a bit more volume. This guitar, the same dimensions, is also what flamencos use. They usually have clear plates.
Because they hit the top of the guitar so much that they don't want to damage the wood. So all that really fun. All that stuff works so well on this instrument too and you can, I hope you can hear, this is a louder sound. This one has a dot on the side. I custom ordered that dot, it cost me 20 bucks.
Now we're just at a classical guitar. This is very familiar. Nice!
So was flamenco the most popular music to be played on this? In Spain. In Spain. The guitar became the national instrument of Spain.
That type of music is, you know, essential to the Spanish sound of music. Also, what was it called at the time? I don't imagine they started calling it classical guitar. That's a good point.
Hey, we got this new thing, it's called a classical guitar. All those terms, the Baroque guitar, the Renaissance guitar, these are hindsight. Yeah, of course. Likely they called it the... the guitar.
One of the most famous composers who played an instrument which was going to be this size was Francisco Tarrega. This is a piece called Recuerdos de la Alhambra, which uses a technique called tremolo. They were coming up with all these amazing new techniques that they were using to full effect and the repertoire for this instrument is really varied.
Played in so many different ways. Yes. But not with a pick yet. The classical guitar wasn't played with a pick because you can't achieve these parts with a pick.
We talked about nails earlier. This is a big topic. I do play with nails on each.
finger, kind of like little picks. For the classical guitar in particular, nails became very popular. So not so much for this one. It's somewhat dependent on the player at this time.
Baroque guitar, some players played with nails. Renaissance guitar, same idea. For the Renaissance lute, no nails was the preference. For oud, of course, they played with a pick.
Eagle squill? Yeah, eagle squill, yeah. That's about as cool as it gets. Coolness for your plectrum has just gone down and down.
Yeah, that's true. It's really important to mention, when one instrument is invented, The ones that came before it don't just get erased from history. Some people played them, so there's overlap. So when the Baroque guitar became popular, it's not that everyone said, now we have a five-course guitar, we don't need a four-course. It was still being played for a while.
And same thing with these two. Some people added a six-string, some people kept their five-string. You play like a nine-string guitar.
Even though the six-string guitar is positive. Yeah, like eight has become my standard now, yeah. When the 19th century guitar and the classical guitar are becoming very popular, the most... Popular way to write music for them became standard music notation, like same as piano and violin.
Do you remember what they used before that? No. Tab. Oh, before this they used tab?
Before that, all of these are tab. Really? Yeah, not the oud. The oud is an oral tradition, but 400 years of tablature.
Whoa. And here I was thinking this whole time a tab is like this new thing. Nope. That just made it easy to share guitar tabs on the internet.
I mean it just makes sense, right? It's super easy, super logical. Tab existed for hundreds of years.
That's how I learned to play guitar. Me too. Was guitar tabs on ultimateguitar.com and guitar pro software. So if you're out there shaming people for using tab... Shame on you.
Shame on you! Let's take one more look at the Stauffer guitar. This has a few things that the classical guitar doesn't have that I've associated with modern guitars.
Like what? The bridge. Yes.
That's the main thing. The reason I wanted to talk about this one again for a second is because the maker of this one, Stauffer, was super famous in Vienna and he had an apprentice in the early 19th century named C.F. Martin, Carl Friedrich Martin, of Martin Guitars.
He was a German guy who studied in Vienna to learn how to make these style of guitars. He moves with his family to New York in like 1833 and tries his luck here. Having studied with the best maker in Vienna, he took off and he started one of the biggest guitar industries.
that America had ever seen. By the early 1900s banjos and mandolins were becoming very popular. Big band era? Yeah, big band era. Banjos, wire strung.
Mandolins at the time, wire strung. They're loud. It wasn't a positive thing that the guitar was this beautiful, romantic instrument. It was like, dude, we can't hear you. So they thought about putting metal strings on it, just like the banjo.
All metal strings, that's so much tension. How is the top going to handle that? And one of the things that made Martin special was around, I think, 1850. He invented this X-bracing system. How you brace the underside of the soundboard changes the sound a lot. And so Martin, around 1850, comes up with this X-bracing pattern, which is apparently more durable, and was kind of very the staple of Martin guitars.
And stops this from flinging off. Yes, it gave more support and changed the tone as well. With all steel, what he had to do was make it much more durable. So he took his X-bracing pattern, made it even more durable, which could handle the steel strings. It worked by like 1920. Steel string acoustic guitars became the guitar.
Here we go. It's an amazing guitar. Modern guitars, we know it. We did it! We made it!
I'm just right at home. It's just a steel string guitar. Hey! In the 20th century, the guitar that really swept the world was the guitar. America, yes, they wanted to compete to be loud enough.
But also steel strings are more durable. They last longer. They're also cheaper. So cheaper, more durable, louder. This is many reasons why in America this took off.
And we had the gears as well. Yep. Different type of gears than the classical.
From here, Martin Guitars experiments a lot with body shape and size. They have all these different models. How wide is the bottom compared to the upper bout. They experimented with really big bodies like dreadnought guitars.
All the different models took off. Now we have a pick guard. Yeah. Do we have a guitar pick? I usually have like 20. Way louder.
Louder. Yeah, you could play this in a band and be heard. Such a different sound than everything.
I mean the steel strings of course. And you can really feel it. There's so much more tension that the strings are under. Without Martin's inventions and this pinhole bridge system, the guitar couldn't sustain all that tension on the top. 1833 right there on the headstock.
See? yeah yeah lovely what's up that thing comes with a ton of Yeah, this has a ton of dots on it. Finally! It took us this long to get the dots on the fretboard. This has a truss rod in it too.
Yes, so the truss rod is in here and it wasn't until around 1940 that we get nylon strings. So for classical guitarists started using nylons that have gut. Why?
It's cheaper. String technology also really influences how guitars are made and built, what players use. Clearly we've seen that from ancient plucked instruments. All the way back in Mesopotamia, all the way to a steel string, it's certainly not a straight line.
It's also not an evolution towards a better and better instrument. Musical taste changes over time. The instruments that we make and use serve the function of allowing us to play the music that we think sounds good. Whatever the musical trends are at the time, that'll shape the instruments we play.
So instruments don't get better and better, they just change with our changing aesthetic. There was many different ways, I'm sure, that all these were played, just like this one is. You can't pick this up and say, this is what the... steel string acoustic sounded like to everybody.
There's so many different styles of music that this plays. Well said. When you go back to the Baroque period, you're doing that for many, many decades, and you have to generalize a lot.
Without any recordings from the time period. Yeah, yeah. So when someone says, this is how world music sounds, well, we're going off of treatises and books of people, and they wrote down the things that were important to them, but they didn't write down everything.
One of the reasons this instrument has been so successful over time is because it's so versatile. Blues, folk, rock, pop, classical. So that's one of the reasons I think it's led to such an incredible popularity.
So far, up... Until now, all of these instruments have been amplified by just the body of the instrument. The next step after this brings me to the type of guitars that are most close to my heart, solid body electric guitars.
And just north in Wisconsin is a Les Paul exhibit at a museum, and we will look at the first ever electric solid body guitar ever made. So that's the next video. Subscribe to that.
Brandon, thanks so much. Hey, man. For everything.
We did it. Yes, we did it. We made it through.
And we'll see you next week. uh and with the first ever electric solid body guitar cool see you then thanks for watching