Saturday, May 1, 2010

Learn to play guitar � Identifying the parts of the guitar

To begin playing the guitar, you must be able to identify the various parts of the guitar. The body and the neck should be pretty obvious as they form the basic shape of the guitar and are what everything else mounts to.

Headstock - On the ends of the neck furthest from the body we have the headstock. Although headstocks are all shaped differently depending on the company that built the guitar, they all serve the same purpose which is to hold the machine heads or tuning pegs.

Machine heads – These are the devices that you turn to make the strings tighter or looser. Machine heads can be laid out in a number of different ways depending on the shape of the headstock but will typically be all along one side, half on one side and half on the other or even four on one side and 2 on the other.

Frets – The frets are the little metal bars that sit on the fingerboard or fretboard on the front of the neck. The frets break the neck up into smaller areas. As you push the string down onto the frets you are shortening the distance from the bridge to the point that stops the string length. The shorter the distance between the two points, the higher the pitch.

The bridge – This is the point on the body that is furthest from the headstock and it fastens the strings to the body. The bridge can be fixed or floating and can be made of metal or wood. Acoustic guitars generally have wooden bridges while electric guitars have metal bridges. A floating bridge will be suspended off of the guitar body by two metal bolts and may have springs attached to the back of the bridge. This allows the bridge to be moved up and down to raise or lower the pitch of the strings for some really cool effects.

Pickups – Are the magnetic devices that are mounted to the guitar body under the strings. They transform the vibration of the strings into a changing magnetic field which causes an electric field to be set up in the wire of the pickup which makes current flow and is transformed into sound. A single pick up is called a “single coil” while a double wide pickup is called a “humbucker”.

Acoustic guitars can also have pickups and they are usually either mounted in the sound hole of the guitar and visible from the front or they are thin metal strips mounted under the saddle of the bridge where the strings rest. These pickups are called “piezo” pickups .