Getting a Grip on How Guitars Work Oakland CA

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You’ve gotta use your hands — both of them

Of course, you play any instrument with your hands, but in the guitar, the two hands perform different tasks — unlike the piano or saxophone where both hands engage in the same kind of action. In a guitar, one hand strikes the strings (usually the right hand), and one hand decides what pitch to sound through fretting. The left hand’s job doesn’t end with just fretting, either. It has additional functions, too, when it comes to connecting notes together through slurs, which it can do without the right hand. The left hand is also responsible for two very important blues guitar techniques: vibrato and string bending.

The right hand is the engine that drives the sound. All the rhythm and dynamics (loud and soft sound) rests with the right hand, and you can’t play even moderately fast and clean unless you’ve developed your right-hand technique. But the training for the right hand is different than from the left. In the end, though, the two must coordinate to create music.

Producing the tones: String vibration and pitch

A guitar is a string instrument, related to the violin and cello in that it generates tones by means of a vibrating string. You set the string in motion by striking or plucking it, which causes it to vibrate, which produces a musical pitch.

For the sound to be heard by human ears, the vibrating string must be amplified in some way. In acoustic instruments, the body acts as the sound chamber, or acoustic amplifier. In electric instruments, the body contributes no amplification to the sound at all. Instead, the amplification is produced by the amplifier, which attaches to the guitar by a removable cable.

Some factors influence the string’s pitch:

Fretting: You can also change the pitch by shortening the string or, more practically, shortening its effective vibrating length. That’s what you do when you fret (press a string to the fretboard at a certain location on the neck). You’re playing shorter versions of the same string. Fretting allows you to play any pitch — flat, sharp, or natural — in the guitar’s entire range.

Mass: A string’s mass, or thickness, influences its pitch. The thicker the string, the lower the pitch. That’s why the low-pitched strings are thicker than the high-pitched ones.

Tension: You can change a string’s pitch by varying the tension of the string. Higher tension produces higher pitched notes. On a guitar, you tighten and loosen a string with the tuning key — a geared mechanism located on the headstock. Turning the tuning key is also how you tune the guitar.

Electric guitars only: Pickups and amplification

Getting your sound out of your electric guitar and to your adoring masses requires you to have command over not only your touch and technique but also the features and functions provided by your particular guitar. Two important features of electric guitars (or plugged-in acoustic guitars) are the pickups and the amplification.

Pickups are the little metal bars that “read” the sound coming off the vibrating string and are important because they transfer the sound down the line. The amplification part of the system is what makes the almost inaudible signal loud enough to be heard.

An acoustic guitar (or unplugged guitar) is pretty much a what-you-see-is-whatyou- get kind of instrument. But when you bring the power of electricity into the picture, now that’s a whole other story. Although you strike the strings on an acoustic and a sound occurs by coming out of the body of the guitar and through the sound hole (or F-holes on an archtop guitar), when you play an electric guitar your sound filters through an amp and takes your sound to the screaming masses at Madison Square Garden. What the multitudes hear is the pickups underneath the strings “sensing” (they don’t “hear” because they’re not using acoustics) the motion of the string through disturbances in their magnetic field. That disturbance generates electrical current that gets sent through a wire out of the guitar to your amp.

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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.

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