Origins & History of Guitar

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The Origins and History of Guitar The guitar is an ancient musical instrument; its history can be traced back to at least 4,000 years ago. Some theories have claimed that the guitar is an ancient development of the ancient Greek kithara and/or the lute. Dr. Michael Kasha’s research in the 1960’s showed that the “lute” shared common ancestors with the guitar but a separate development and had no possible effect on the guitars evolution. There is however evidence on the “kithara” theory. There is a similarity between the Greek word “kithara” and the Spanish word “guitar.” Dr. Kasha later than questioned the Greeks on where they got the name “kithara” and realizes that the earliest kithara had only four strings when introduced from abroad. He guesses the Greeks took the old Persian name for a 4-stringed instrument “chartar.” The guitar was invented four hundred years ago and ever since then it has been such a good innovative instrument. The guitar serves as sound, or the heart of a song. It could be used in many different types of music from Heavy Metal and punk music, to Jazz, and Blues it has been the biggest factor in modern music and between acoustic guitar and electric guitar there is a lot of history. The name “guitar” originates from the ancient Sanskrit word for “string”-“tar”. The first guitar made looked nothing like the ones we use now, in fact they were called “lutes,” not guitars. Lutes later developed into vihuelas, then later established into guitars in the fifteenth century. The first guitar was called a four course guitar and was called that because it had only four strings. The four-course guitar also had a different tuning than D-G-B-E tuning; rather it was tuned to C-F-A-D which is a tone lower. Then later in the sixteenth century the five-course guitar was established. This guitar was exact same as the four-course guitar just had frets an

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