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Hi,
Do you encounter any problem in your music learning process?
If you have any issue with your musical instruments or any questions related to other musical instruments in general, you can reply to this email. We value your support very much.
Due to our customer base growing at a rapid rate, we’ve been receiving a lot of questions, not only about our product but also about music and musical instruments in general. We decided to release newsletters regularly on general knowledge of musical instrument products and its technical support, to all who had been supporting us along the journey.
Our default language used for this newsletter is English. If you need Bahasa or Mandarin version, please reply BM or CN to this email.
We also need your suggestion on what direction for this newsletter to go, do let us know which instrument we should cover and what problem that bothers you while playing your instrument, or whatever that sparks your interests in your musical journey.
So in this very first newsletter, we would like to cover the anatomy of an acoustic guitar. Over many years in this business, we discovered the majority of the guitar casual guitar players do not know the “names” of the parts.
All these often lead to miscommunication between guitar owners and guitar shops. Now, let's check the picture below: |
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A. Headstock
The head of the guitar. It holds the machine heads, the tuning post, the string tree and also the nut.
B. Fingerboard and the Neck
The neck is a piece of long wood connecting the headstock and the body.
On top of the neck it is the fingerboard, also called the fretboard: a piece of wood glued on top of the neck and holds all the frets. Guitar strings run across the guitar bridge to the nut on top of the fingerboard and frets. By pressing the string down towards the fingerboard, it will change the pitch of the note.
C. The body
The body is the most iconic image of the guitar. It is made up of the “top”, “side”, “back”.
The top is a piece of wood that typically has a big hole (sound hole) and holds the bridge, saddle and end pins. There are a lot of strips and pieces of wood glued at the bottom to strengthen the “top” from collapsing caused by the tension of the strings. This can be seen by sticking a mirror into the sound hole. The side and the back are thin pieces of wood glued together to the top.
When the guitar player strum the strings, the vibration is transferred to the body of the guitar and then projected by the sound hole. The top will respond to the vibration the most, that is why tonewood such as: spruce, cedar, maple, mahogany, sapele and others are typically used in making the top.
Guitar bodies are made up of many shapes and sizes to cater to specific sound characteristics and needs.
D. Upper and lower bout
The body is separated by a “waist” into 2 sections, the upper half and the lower half, aka” upper bout and lower bout”.
Some guitars have a “cutaway”(look at the attached photo on top), at the upper bout to allow easy access while playing the higher pitch. Acoustic guitars with wider lower bout typically have a more “bass” characteristic due to more space for air in the body.
Ok this email is getting longer than I actually planned, for the next email, we will talk about the spare parts.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, see you soon.
Daniel PBH Music |
