When is a guitar a guitar?

Bob-Dubery

I got e-mailed some instructions "how to make your own guitar". I'm should they would have worked. It involved getting an old oil tin, cutting some holes, fixing a piece of wood. That was about it.

But no frets (which was convenient - no need to worry about pesky things like intonation).

So I said to myself "that's not a guitar, it's an oud".

And then I thought of things I've seen in museums. Like a Stradivarious guitar at the Ashmolean in Oxford. 4 courses, cat gut frets....

And so I asked myself "what makes a guitar a guitar? 6 strings? Certain tuning? Frets? A number of frets?" Clearly it's not anything with a bridge, a neck and strings or even with a bridge, a neck, strings and frets.

Maybe there is no definition.

So know I lay these questions before the learned and august persons of this forum.

AlanRatcliffe

Strictly speaking, a guitar is a fretted stringed instrument which is played by plucking strings with one hand while pressing down notes with the other. However, this definition would by necessity include some far-flung members of the guitar family such as mandolins, Ouds, Sitars, ukeleles and citterns, which have in many cases developed into instruments in their own right.

Further complicating things are the number of hybrid instruments such as harp guitars and banjos, which Add to this the modern instruments such as fretless guitars, the Stick, the Warr guitar, some of which are not even plucked. A case can even be made for the Starrlabs Z-Tar and the SynthAxe, which are actually guitar-shaped MIDI controllers (although not always even guitar shaped!).

So I think at the end of the day a "guitar" is actually anything you say is a guitar. Kind of like Frank Zappa on the definition of music:
If it can be conceived as music, it can be executed as music, and presented to an audience in such a way that they will perceive it as music.
Likewise, anything presented as a guitar (ideally having some connection with a guitar) can be conceived as such.

Bob-Dubery

Alan Ratcliffe wrote
So I think at the end of the day a "guitar" is actually anything you say is a guitar. Kind of like Frank Zappa on the definition of music:
If it can be conceived as music, it can be executed as music, and presented to an audience in such a way that they will perceive it as music.
Likewise, anything presented as a guitar (ideally having some connection with a guitar) can be conceived as such.

Cool!

Ladies and Gents. I am now a guitar player.

Good luck to the rest of you ?

AlanRatcliffe

? LOL! Zappa really believed it too. He once paid royalties for "using part" of John Cage's 4'33" in one of his own compositions. Apparently Cage liked Frank's version so much that he was selected to record a version of the original for an album of Cage covers (which Zappa did a short month before his own death).

Surreal...

Riaan-Combrink

Alan Ratcliffe wrote So I think at the end of the day a "guitar" is actually anything you say is a guitar. Kind of like Frank Zappa on the definition of music:
If it can be conceived as music, it can be executed as music, and presented to an audience in such a way that they will perceive it as music.

An American judge in an obscenity case had to determine a definition for pornography, and settled on "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it". ?