The same melody, three different families

Every string instrument on Earth makes its sound one of three ways: a bow drags the string, a finger or pick plucks it, or a hammer strikes it. Pick an action and hear the same short phrase synthesised in that timbre. Same notes, very different worlds.

Plays "Mary Had a Little Lamb" — public domain. Synthesised tones approximate the action's envelope; a real instrument carries detail no oscillator captures.

Three actions, three families

All chordophones share the same physics: a stretched string is set vibrating, and the body of the instrument amplifies the sound. What sets them apart is how the string is set vibrating. There are only three ways.

A bow — horsehair tightened across a stick, coated with sticky pine rosin — drags across the string. The rosin grips, the string flexes, the rosin releases, the string snaps back. That cycle happens hundreds of times per second and continues as long as the bow keeps moving. That is why a violinist can hold a single note for ten seconds and a guitarist cannot.

A pluck — finger, fingernail, plectrum or quill — pulls the string sideways and lets it go. All the energy goes into the string at once, then immediately starts dissipating. The note begins loud and decays. Guitars, harps, banjos and harpsichords all sit here.

A strike — a hammer, mallet or tangent hits the string and bounces off. Like a pluck, all the energy is delivered instantly, but the attack is more percussive and the string is free to ring. The piano is the world's most familiar struck chordophone. So is the hammered dulcimer, which predates the piano by centuries.

The orchestra is mostly strings

In a 100-musician symphony orchestra, around 60 of the seats are string players. The bowed strings provide most of the texture you hear in any orchestral work, which is one reason composers have written for them for 400 years and counting.

The modern violin family was established in Cremona, Italy, in the second half of the 16th century. Andrea Amati (c. 1505–1577) is credited with the first instruments recognisably built to the violin pattern. His grandson Nicolò Amati taught both Antonio Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri, and Cremonese instruments from roughly 1660 to 1750 still set the price ceiling for the entire family — the "Lady Blunt" Stradivarius sold for £9.8 million in 2011.

Popular music runs on plucked strings

Outside the concert hall, almost every chordophone you hear is plucked. The Spanish luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado standardised the six-string classical guitar around 1850 in Seville. A century later, in 1950, Leo Fender shipped the first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar — the Broadcaster, soon renamed the Telecaster. The Gibson Les Paul followed in 1952 and the Fender Stratocaster in 1954. Those three models still define the electric guitar.

Leo Fender did the same trick for the bass guitar in 1951 with the Precision Bass — a fretted, electrified instrument that solved the rock-band problem of being unable to hear the double bass. The folk side of plucked strings keeps adding members: the 5-string banjo (reshaped from West African instruments in 19th-century America), the mandolin (Italian, paired strings tuned in fifths), the ukulele (Hawaiian via Madeira, 1880s) and the world traditions — sitar, oud, lute, koto, balalaika.

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Live microphone tuners with cents meters and reference tones — one for every string instrument on this page. Plus a beginner-friendly guitar chord chart. No installs, no accounts, no ads inside the tools themselves.

The piano is a string instrument (acoustically)

One of the more counter-intuitive results of the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system (Erich M. von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, 1914) is that the piano is a struck chordophone — a string instrument. Inside every grand and upright sit roughly 230 steel strings stretched over a cast-iron frame, and pressing a key throws a felted hammer at them.

The piano was invented around 1700 in Florence by Bartolomeo Cristofori, keeper of instruments at the Medici court. He called it the gravicembalo col piano e forte — the harpsichord with soft and loud — because his hammer mechanism, unlike the harpsichord's plucking jacks, let the player control dynamics with finger pressure. The name shortened to pianoforte, then to piano.

The hammered dulcimer is the piano's older relative — same struck-string concept, just played directly with held mallets instead of through a keyboard. It is the family every concert pianist quietly inherits from.

Explore the other instrument families