Five different instruments. One word. Hear the difference.

Pick a guitar type below. Tap individual open strings, or strum an E minor chord. The classical and the overdriven electric share a name, a tuning, and almost nothing else. Headphones recommended for the bass.

Pure synthesis — the distortion is a soft-clipped tanh waveshaper, not a real Marshall amp, and a real guitar has fingertip noise, body resonance, and pickup variation that no oscillator can reproduce. What is real here is the relative difference between the five tones. That is the whole question every beginner is asking.

The four invention moments that made the modern guitar

Unlike the violin, which has not fundamentally changed since 1750, the guitar is a relatively young instrument that has been redesigned from scratch four times since 1850. Each redesign is owed to one person or workshop with a name, a date, and a city.

1. Antonio de Torres Jurado (Spain, c.1850). Before Torres, "guitar" meant a small parlour instrument with a body roughly the size of a modern ukulele tenor, strung with gut strings of inconsistent tension. Working in his Almería workshop, Torres enlarged the body, lowered the bridge, standardised the scale length at 65 cm, redesigned the internal fan bracing, and produced an instrument loud and tonally rich enough to fill a concert hall. The modern classical guitar is essentially a Torres guitar with modern strings. Every Spanish-school maker since (Ramírez, Fleta, Hauser) has worked inside the Torres template.

2. Christian Frederick Martin (United States, 1840s). Saxon-born German luthier who emigrated to New York in 1833 and founded what is still the C.F. Martin company. His decisive innovation was X-bracing — a pattern of internal wooden struts under the soundboard that allowed the top to handle the much higher tension of steel strings without collapsing. (Steel strings on a Torres-braced classical guitar will tear the top apart within months.) Martin's dreadnought body shape, introduced in 1916, is the basic shape of every steel-string acoustic guitar made since.

3. George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker (United States, 1932). The first commercial electric guitar — the Rickenbacker "frying pan," a cast-aluminium lap-steel — went on sale in 1932 with a horseshoe-magnet pickup designed by Beauchamp. Within four years Gibson had answered with the ES-150 (1936), the first widely-used electric Spanish guitar. Charlie Christian made it famous in Benny Goodman's band by 1939. The electric guitar was a working professional instrument before the Second World War.

4. Leo Fender (United States, 1950). The hollow body of the ES-150 was a holdover from the acoustic era. A radio repairman named Leo Fender, working out of a small Fullerton, California workshop, asked the question: if a magnetic pickup converts string vibration into voltage, why does the guitar need to be hollow at all? His answer was the Fender Esquire (1950), rebranded the Telecaster in 1952 — a solid plank of ash with a bolted-on maple neck and a pickup screwed to the body. The Stratocaster (1954) followed, the Gibson Les Paul (1952) was Gibson's response, and the design space of the modern electric guitar was effectively settled by 1955.

The 10 guitar types in working use

Every type below is currently in production by at least one major manufacturer. Tunings are given as the open-string pitches from low to high.

Specialty variants on the margins: lap steel and pedal steel guitars (played horizontally with a metal bar instead of fingers — distinct enough to be a different instrument), harp guitars (added unfretted bass strings), travel/parlour guitars (smaller-bodied), and headless designs. Lap and pedal steel are usually treated as their own category rather than as guitar types.

"Acoustic or electric?" — the question every beginner asks

The internet's most-asked guitar question, and the one the widget at the top of this page is built to answer. The honest version of the answer is: they are not two flavours of the same instrument; they are two different instruments that share a name and a tuning.

Acoustic guitar — usually a steel-string flat-top — is self-contained. It needs no electricity. The sound comes from the strings vibrating a wooden soundboard. The hardware cost is just the guitar itself, typically $150–$500 for a beginner-quality instrument. The sound is fixed: once you have an acoustic, you have an acoustic. Style fits: folk, country, singer-songwriter, fingerstyle, the music of someone sitting alone with the instrument.

Electric guitar requires more equipment — at minimum a small amplifier ($100+), preferably a cable, ideally an overdrive pedal. The instrument itself is silent without amplification (an unplugged electric is roughly as loud as a violin played with a feather). What it offers in exchange is enormous tonal range: the same instrument moves between Wes Montgomery's clean octaves and Tony Iommi's downtuned riffs depending on what is plugged in after it. Style fits: rock, blues, metal, jazz, funk, country lead, any music that wants the guitar to do something other than just strum chords.

Classical guitar — the option most beginners forget exists — is its own thing again. Nylon strings, wide neck, no pickups, fingerpicked. It is the easiest of the three on a beginner's fingertips (nylon is gentler than steel) and it is the only one suited to classical and flamenco repertoire. The downside is that very little popular music sits on it naturally — a Beatles song played on a classical guitar will sound polite rather than alive. If you want classical or flamenco, get a classical. If you want folk or pop, get a steel-string acoustic. If you want rock or blues, get an electric.

The six players who decided what the guitar means

One classical, one country-blues, one early-electric-jazz, three rock — covering the instrument's hundred-year arc from concert hall to stadium stack.

Guitar tools and quick-answer pages

The guitar's question universe is too big for one page. Below are the specialist tools and dedicated quick-answer pages that drill into the highest-demand sub-questions.

Adjacent terms

Guitar Center — the American musical instrument retail chain, founded in Hollywood, California in 1959. Nothing to do with a type of guitar; it's the retailer. UK readers searching this term are usually looking for guitarguitar.co.uk; Australian readers for Mannys, Allans Billy Hyde or Music Workshop.

Ultimate Guitar — a website (ultimate-guitar.com) hosting user-submitted guitar tablature and chord transcriptions. The reference resource for learning specific songs.

Guitar tab / tablature — a notation system that shows which fret to press on which string, rather than musical pitches on a staff. Six lines representing the six guitar strings, with numbers indicating fret positions. Not the same as standard musical notation; far easier for beginners.

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