Hear what 6, 7, 8 and 12 strings each sound like.

Tap a configuration. See the open strings of that variant. Tap an individual string to hear it, or hit Strum to play an E minor chord through the whole array. The 12-string's paired octaves are the magic trick — same chord, completely different instrument.

Pure synthesis — a real 12-string has tactile string spacing and resonance that no synthesiser can match. The chorusing effect, though, comes from the cent-offset between paired strings, which the widget does reproduce.

How 6 became the standard

The guitar's ancestors had four, five, even ten strings. The 16th-century vihuela had six pairs of strings tuned like a lute. The Baroque guitar (popular roughly 1600–1750) had five pairs — ten strings arranged in five courses, like a smaller, brighter lute. The transition to single-stringed six-string instruments happened gradually across Europe from about 1770, driven by a generation of luthiers — Stauffer in Vienna, Lacôte in Paris, Panormo in London — experimenting with simplified construction.

By the time the Spanish luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado finalised the modern classical guitar in his Almería workshop around 1850, the 6-string single-course configuration was firmly the standard. Torres's design — six gut strings tuned EADGBE, fanned internal bracing under the soundboard, a body roughly the size we still use — became the template for every steel-string acoustic and electric guitar that came after.

Six is not a magic number; it is a design compromise. It spans a useful pitch range (about two and a half octaves with open strings) while keeping chord-shape geometry manageable for one human hand. Most chord shapes only use four or five strings simultaneously. Adding a seventh string would either over-complicate barre chords or sit muted most of the time. Six is what happens when you optimise for "useful range" against "shapes a human can fret."

7 and 8 strings — the extended range

Both extra strings sit below the standard low E, extending the playable range downward rather than upward. The 7-string adds a low B; the 8-string adds a low F# beneath that. Both have specific musical homes.

The modern 7-string was popularised by Steve Vai's signature Ibanez Universe (1990), the first mainstream production 7-string electric. It found its audience four years later, when Korn's self-titled debut (1994) anchored the entire nu-metal movement on detuned 7-string riffs. Today, almost every working progressive or modern-metal guitarist owns at least one.

The 8-string took longer. The Swedish band Meshuggah commissioned a custom 8-string Nevborn in 2003 and built the entire djent genre around it; Ibanez introduced a production 8-string the same year. The 8-string's lowest pitch (F#1, around 46 Hz) is in territory that traditionally belonged to bass guitar, which is exactly the point — the instrument lets metal guitarists play riffs without coordinating with a separate bass player. Tosin Abasi of Animals As Leaders is the technical reference point for what an 8-string can do as a solo instrument.

The 12-string is a 6-string with a built-in chorus

A 12-string guitar has six courses of paired strings rather than six single strings. From the player's perspective, you fret chord shapes exactly as on a 6-string — the pairs sit so close together that each "string" you press is actually two strings being fretted at once. The tuning is also EADGBE — but with the bottom four courses doubled an octave apart, and the top two courses doubled in unison.

The sound is the entire point of the instrument. Two strings tuned to the same nominal pitch are never exactly the same frequency — string thickness, age and stretch all vary slightly — so each pair beats against itself by a few cents. The result is a natural chorusing effect, a shimmering "chime" no 6-string can reproduce without an effects pedal. The classic example is the opening of The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" (1965), played by Roger McGuinn on a Rickenbacker 360/12. Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'" (1989), Leo Kottke's entire fingerstyle catalogue, and parts of Led Zeppelin III run on the same instrument.

The downside is that 12-strings are physically demanding — twice the string tension on the neck, more pressure to fret cleanly, and they go out of tune faster. Most working players own one but use it sparingly.

All the working string counts

Highlighted row is the standard. Production runs of 9 and 10-string guitars are made by a small handful of boutique luthiers; if you need one you will be ordering it built, not buying it off a shelf.

A few practical notes

String number conventions reverse. The lowest-pitched (thickest) string on a 6-string is called the 6th string; the highest (thinnest) is the 1st. This is the reverse of every other numbering people are used to. The convention comes from early classical guitar tablature.

Each string is a different material. On a standard steel-string acoustic the 1st, 2nd and 3rd strings are plain steel; the 4th, 5th and 6th are steel cores wound with bronze, phosphor bronze or nickel-bronze wire. On a classical guitar the top three are nylon and the bottom three are nylon-filament cores wound with silver-plated copper. The mixed construction is one of the reasons string-changing is a per-string operation rather than a bulk job.

Strings have a finite life. A working musician typically changes strings every 1–3 months; a hobbyist who plays daily, every 2–6 months. Old strings sound dull and go out of tune faster as the metal fatigues. Need a tuner to check? The free tuner is here →

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