The History of Guitar

we got something really cool for the channel today we got brandon aker here back our friendly neighborhood stringed instrument historian for this video we're going to go through the history of the guitar where the guitar came from and how we got to what we know and love today seven checkpoints along the way of the history of the guitar starting in the 15th century snapshots through time towards the evolution to the guitar and we get to play all of them as well and we're going to jam on all of them no stairways oh man as far back as we can go where did the guitar come from the guitar is a member of the loot family the oldest member of the loot family comes from 5 000 years ago in mesopotamia there's this instrument called the tanbor which is still played today around 3100 bce they discovered this instrument called the tanbor and there's actually tons of instruments from ancient civilizations like in central asia in egypt and in mesopotamia where they were playing these these loot-like instruments you can see them in sculptures and paintings and artwork that brings us to actually ask the question what is a guitar yeah what's a guitar and which one of these ancient ancestors you know eventually turns into the guitar unfortunately we're not gonna be able to solve that one today for the sake of this video what's important is that there are many instruments like liars which are harp-like instruments as well as ton boards kitaras the first thing we can call a guitar doesn't come around until around 1500. where does that name even come from there's a lot of theories about that there's an instrument called a tar for example and i think tar actually just means like string kartar i think is it or something like that and car is four and tar is string so it's like a four string instrument depending on the number of strings it'll have a different name these instruments come from the chordophone family and when you give something a name like chordophones what's the chordphone chord is greek for string and phonos is greek for sound string instruments that make sounds yeah quarter phones boxes with strings on them i have picked an instrument today to start with which i think is the one that we can say this one for sure at least gets us towards the path of the guitar and which one is that the arabic ood this beautiful instrument got a teardrop shape a big bold back with individual strips of what we call ribs these are heated up and bent that's how you get the wood bent a short neck cool bent back peg box with these like violin like a serious angle there yeah each string is doubled there are 11 strings and what what year was this invented so i don't know the exact year that this was invented but yeah i imagine you don't have the patent but like generally yeah this instrument has gone back in time for thousands of years it comes from the very ancient instrument called a barbot the first iterations only had four strings and over time they they added more and more until they end up with 11 and sometimes i think they even have 13. this is still really popular today yeah especially in places like turkey and the middle east and north africa this instrument is played all over the place the reason i'm starting with this one is because historically we know how this was brought to europe and the chain of events that occurred that led to the guitar this is the great great great grandparent maybe yeah i love the guitar and it's pretty much played like guitar you know they even play with a plectrum oh i was wondering what that is yeah this is made of plastic but traditionally the plectrum would have been made of wood or even like an eagle's quilt you open your hand and you put your pinky around it and then you hold it between these two fingers just like that use a lot of wrist to really dig into the string to get a good resonant tone so the tuning is c f a d g c okay um there's a little bit of that that i recognize totally yeah because it's tuned in fourths with one major third f okay major third everything else is a fourth that's a guitar right the thing that really drove me to be infatuated with this thing is the fact that it has no frets yeah the reason that this instrument needs to be fretless is because arabic music especially uses scales called mccombs those scales have notes in them that don't exist in the western scale they're in between our 12-tone western system of semi-tones without frets that means you can get all those spicy in between notes the octave split into 12 semitones was that the average in the west it was yeah it was at that time this classification of the the church modes that we've heard about in music theory for example is basically a way of breaking the octave into 12 even steps so in the west that's a very old idea and that's how music has worked since in the east it kind of took a different path there's these cool notes i learned about called half flats we have like a a sharp b they have a b flat and there's a b half flat in between here's an a that's about a b flat a western b flat semitone here's a half flat apparently what region you come from changes how flat that half flat is it's hard for me to learn well how flat is it if it's just kind of in the middle so that's one of the biggest challenges i've got just enough so we can at least hear the sound of the instrument [Music] do [Music] awesome yeah that's the music you would have been hearing at that time yeah you could really see how the fretless is absolutely necessary for that totally those those little ornaments the sliding thing is so cool but we can see where the guitar is starting to form can i play it yes you can play it all right thanks i'll be careful wrap your pinky around it okay and now just grip it between your thumb and index finger so your thumb is it's there and then you can wrap your arm around and really all right like wrist and arms i love that it's got this low string yeah the low c is cool [Music] [Laughter] this is mainly a melodic instrument without the frets it really is hard to play chords in tune yeah so you don't have to worry so much about that it's mainly placed melodies so not so much you can do that but it's very advanced it's a little yeah it's a little tough there's also no markers to where the notes would be you use your ear yeah ear plus muscle memory [Music] [Laughter] this pic is really because it's so close to what i'm used to but not quite it's really it took me a minute too [Music] i loved that what you were doing earlier we're so used to doing maybe a little trill yeah yeah but the fact that you can do all those little slidey things are yeah it's just really characteristic of the music yeah what are you plucking like right here right here over this this extra piece of wood here is essentially a pick guard oh yeah of course something like that having six pairs of strings almost it makes me want to just go right to the chords and i know like here's here's an everybody how beautiful this thailand look at these different pieces of wood for each millimeter around the entire thing right through here as well it kind of does look at the top similar to the fretboard that i'm used to but so micro tonal in the inside the label is great to look at oh and it comes with his picture on it and his email this sound we're hearing especially with these specific scales was in the ears of people especially uh in places like persia this is still played in popular music so it's incredible that this has lasted so long but later would branch off into something else should we talk about how that yeah because i mean we're only on the first one and already i feel like i could be here all day yeah that's trying to figure out how to play this that's going to be the the trap of the day how do we go to the next one if we fast forward a bit in the year 7 11 the moors invade spain and they bring with them the ood and apparently the spanish must have been really infatuated by the instrument because they kind of stole it made it their own loot and play it kind of like the ood for hundreds of years through the medieval period they kept the pick they took the gut strings they were using because remember this would have been gut strings these are modern strings right now they're they're metal wound and some nylon but at the time it would have been gut which is remember animal intestine usually sheep intestine and what the europeans did was they took those strings and they tied them around to fix the pitches so you can play chords and you're also now you're fixed into the western tonal system right so i have a loop now we're into the 1500s yeah and so now we are into the 1500s in the renaissance the same concept the double stringing this is seven pairs this one has seven medieval loots would have had just four or five pairs but again they still played them with the pick and it kind of still sounds more or less like a nude by the end of the 15th century you get this which is usually a six course loot this one has seven which they added later and over time they just kept adding bases more and more and more why was that the norm to have pairs of strings one of the reasons especially in the bass register is that when you play a gut string where the string is only this long the note sounds a bit flubby by adding an extra octave high g and a low g it makes it sound like a louder more punchy version of that g they weren't very bright like the steel strings we know of course have a very bright sound the gut is actually a bit brighter than nylon really yeah but not as bright as steel but i think another reason for the double strings is it also gives you a chorus effect you know when you have one singer sing versus two singers saying they're never exactly in tune and it creates a thicker sound one time for just an experiment i took off all the double strings on this loot just to see what it sounded like and it sounded awful like it just lost all of its resonance have you ever heard the term uh sympathetic resonation yeah when you play one note and then stop it you can actually tell that all the other strings are vibrating even if they're not touched [Music] and that adds in like a built-in reverb to the instrument exactly and the more strings you have the more sympathetic resonation you get that's a big part of like the sitar for example like it has a ton of strings on it that you don't play you can but they're mainly just there to vibrate along with you it's like a built-in like really beautiful reverb they always kept the the first string single the chanterelle which means the singing string was often single it allows the melodies to be a little bit more clear seven sets of strings correct with the top one on its own correct and how is this tuned it's like a guitar with a capo on the third fret it would become g to g okay if we forget about the sixth course because the earliest renaissance loots which is what we can call this didn't have the seventh string fourth one third but the third's in a different place so we get all right there are some shapes where you can do guitar like chords and it works like d major that's a d major and this would be a c major chord the shapes aren't so unfamiliar no but they're just one string up yes so this is the first one where just like that if i picked it up and did my regular guitar thing here's a c major it would work you could figure it wouldn't be a c major but it would work this instrument's heyday was really the 16th century it existed in the 15th century as well but the 16th century is really when this instrument was popular this instrument was played by kings queens it was used during shakespeare plays it was even played by common people eventually they dropped the pick but they kept their hand positioned like this and the reason they dropped the pick was because of the renaissance you have the birth of polyphony when you have many different parts which are independent melodies that occur at the same time and they weave together to create wonderful harmony but with a pick right you can only really play yeah you know one line at a time and maybe you can strum chords yeah but you can really start to sound like a guitar they figured out that if you drop the pick and use your fingers you can play several different voices at the same time because your thumb can play one part and your fingers can play a different part the most famous piece for the renaissance loot is probably by this english composer named john dowland and he wrote this piece called the locker main pavan which he later wrote lyrics for with the singer it's called flow my tears polyphony was this normally played in a band with other instruments was this a solo instrument both all across the board there's an amazing literature of music for just a solo loot with voice it's like the original singer songwriters yeah right this is also kind of the era where secular song starts to become really popular the medieval period mostly sacred music religious music right yeah so these songs like flow my tears is about sadness and grief not about religious connotation or something so the birth of secular music becomes very popular with especially loot music troubadour songs stuff like that so before this i mean we're going back so far that if you were making music it was probably for the church so at the time was it like rebellious to like go to a concert or maybe maybe that's still the case but like to be to go to see music but just to see music that was a different thing it was definitely a different thing they were exploring a very human emotion you know flow my tears fall from your springs exiled forever let me rest uh it's like it's just like they're so dark the 1500s were just really sad yeah they're pretty emo [Laughter] it's like popular music mostly sad no john dowling was kind of the king of of writing melancholic music although he wasn't a very sad person turns out he was actually a spy uh that's the thing about loot players which is pretty cool yeah really loot players had the positions and they had the ear of the king like they could sometimes their best position you can have as a loot player would be to serenade the king to sleep because it's so charmingly soft they had positions at court you can hear the king speak you might hear some some gossip and so actually loot players were often spies wow so don't tell me any of your secrets yeah it's hilarious that you there was a job to serenade the king to sleep isn't that great i guess we do that now i often have my phone and i'll put on some music if i'm going to sleep i guess if you were rich enough at the time you would hire someone to do that for you what a weird position it is a very delicate soft sound but uh rather than thinking of it as a defect it has a charm because i would think that these instruments at the the time would be made to be louder because of course this is way before amplification but this is playing at about speaking volume if the instrument's too loud it overpowers them yes so i can speak to you and while i'm playing or sing and the loot never overpowers me which means it's a perfect accompaniment instrument delicate yeah it's beautiful the piece that i played the locker mate pavan how i played it was just the first level any loot player worth their weight wouldn't just play that on the repeat they would add what are called divisions here's the simple version [Music] again already complicated four voices but with divisions [Music] it becomes much more interesting and you can improvise those on the spot and any elite player at the time would have been an amazing improviser another good riff i like is the ending melody that can become was being a full-time musician at this point like probably the best position that i know of that you could get was at courts yeah because if your patron was royalty you were paid well you were taken care of and that's essentially what you would have needed was you would need patronage this is later but bach for example i was had a very common job which was music director at a church and so every week he had to write more music for the church so all the strengths so far would be animal intestine as you saw with me having trouble with those thirds we could take that same animal intestine we're using for the strings wrap it around the fretboard fingerboard and make it a fretboard yeah we fixed the pitches and by the way that there are some ancient instruments like remember the ton bore that i mentioned that one from like 3 100 yeah did that one have threats that one had frets so the idea of frets uh wasn't a new invention for the europeans it fit in with their their musical system at the time here we have gut frets these are a real gut that i've tied around myself also that this headstock is just really cool from the ood remember i mean this is almost the same thing we have the teardrop shape now we get this beautiful decoration called the rose we still have the bowl back and we still have the cool bent back peg box with all these friction pegs we're way before gears those geared tuners didn't come around to i think something like 18 20. yeah so friction pegs were the deal and by the way they they're fine like if you have a good set of them they they work well but they can't micro tune as easily as the gears count yeah for people unaware of friction pegs it's just held in there by friction of course yeah you just you push and turn and that's what keeps the the string is i mean violence that's what they still do today right because they held a pick like this and they would strum down and up down as strong up as weak right that's kind of natural effect you get rather than just which is a little bit you know not very musical and thrash metal right yeah yeah [Music] i mean that's telling too that that works on this instrument right we're getting they wanted to preserve this strong weak idea but still use the fingers so they use the thumb for down and they use the index finger on the way up strong weak strong weak you get this fast way of playing down and up uh to play those divisions [Music] so it's actually pretty pretty fast while you're playing fast you still get strong weak strong weak strong which is very musical and perfect for the music of the time that's the basics of the renaissance yeah can you give it a try oh yeah i haven't prepared anything given right your treatises no i don't have yet i don't have any treatises with me this feels like a guitar oh no i'm so close forget about this string yeah you have a guitar oh okay all right it's just down the whole step so that's a b flat major chord instead of a c major board [Music] nice melancholy it would be down with the thumb and then up correct the instrument is going to be more horizontal to the ground and you come like this and your thumb is underneath your index finger down with the thumb up with the index finger but it's underneath it correct ooh all the paintings show them playing in this in this position jeez yeah that's really tough yeah that's so different yeah i probably won't have time to nail that now this goes down to that's a low d so imagine you take a standard guitar and you tune it down a whole step to d yeah that's what that is yeah whoa like it can sound so pretty and also sounds so nice that sounds awesome yeah whoa it's very guitar-like yeah i mean bar chord bam my muscle memory works [Music] oops dangerous oh i can't move my frets that's different this might seem like a disadvantage but this is a huge advantage for these instruments having movable threats so we can basically raise or lower different notes of that 12-tone system to be more in tune to fine-tune more than a guitar with fixed frets yeah that's a big part of the guitar that i learned through getting so frustrated with it while recording is that guitars are just by their nature a little out of tune they're equally out of tune yeah they're equally out of tune equal temperament i remember recording and just thinking my my guitar is broken not every single fret on the fretboard is perfectly in tune i got to bring it into a shot but no that's just what guitars are the whole point is that you can play in every single key you can play in c sharp minor and then go to e flat major and all those things will sound good the only way temperaments work is if you make some keys sound good and some keys not sound so great some chords sound great beautiful and some chords are very extra dissonance so you're favoring certain notes and then actually in the end if you're sticking to one key you can play much more in tune with much sweeter especially major thirds are the big ones major thirds and equal temperament are super sharp and with the movable frets you're able to bring it into those different temperaments and have it be more perfectly in tune i often tune my guitars while recording a little bit differently so that they work for that one particular key [Music] what i love about your your first try on every single instrument i've ever shown you yeah even classical guitarists who have a doctorate they go to pick up a loot and they try to play one melody and you always go for the hardest thing and nail it well i don't know if i nail it [Music] it feels like i have a regular six string guitar where every string is double so like a 12 string and then another string on top yes and it's in a different tuning yes [Music] the next instrument yeah comes around 1500. this is loot-like it has double strings friction pegs gut frets but now we've lost the teardrop shape we've got an hourglass which is a minnesota guitar right we have a flat back oh that sounds cool straight headstock not the bent back headstock anymore we have made it to our first ever guitar all right so this is the renaissance guitar is this when they started using the word guitar as well yeah this is 1500s we have the first guitar correct and the tuning my dog has fleas [Laughter] it's a ukulele that's where the ukulele tuning comes from g-c-e-a and the portuguese in 1550 brought this to hawaii and they later turned it into the ukulele right on this instrument was really popular for strumming much easier to manage chords as any you player would know we went from very nearly having the guitars tuning right to changing it and then coming back to it later i think the reason that this one kind of got demoted in terms of the number of strings is because when you have less strings it's easier to form chords with only one finger down i can play a c major chord pretty easy and they thought the same thing some people we've even criticized this instrument as being too simple to play chords but it's great for chords very easy to strum very easy to play songs and then self-accompany you you could sing over that very easily but they kept the chanterelle they kept the double stringing and they also developed a small solo repertoire for it and there's a lot of beautiful pieces especially from france [Music] what got them to this body shape to this hourglass shape that we know was it because it could rest on your leg easier you start seeing those hourglass shapes in the 1500s but it's a really good question as to what's the impetus behind the shapes of our instruments this of course makes sense because you just put it on your leg and you play it here you can put it on your other leg and i pick up these and i don't really know how to hold it or simply that i just don't have any experience holding these there's a reason for the ball back when you have a deep bowl there just often makes it so that you have a better base and maybe there was something about the flat back and hourglass shape which produced an ideal sound for yeah maybe there are different sizes by the way you can have slightly bigger and slightly smaller instruments that's the basic renaissance guitar one yeah i would love to why this change to this headstock and not this as far as i know the reasoning for the the bent backward peg box if you have seven doubled strings that's a lot of strings and if you just kept going farther away you you start yeah yeah so by bending it back you're able to easily access all of the tuning pegs so you're not only a few strings you don't need to bend it back because it doesn't go too far maybe that's one of the reasons it's it's interesting a lot of these conversations we're going to have today are partially speculation yeah [Music] i don't quite have that same technique you have i use the the like fleshy parts of my fingers [Music] what is that what am i playing there i just stumbled upon it i didn't prepare anything yes but yeah that's just a ukulele and still my guitar muscle memory works because i can play it just if i forget about the lowest two strings yes imagine it's the top four strings of the guitar yeah one of the reasons also this is a guitar is because the top four strings are proportionally the same if i just told you those were d g b e anything you played would be this as the same yeah as you played on a guitar i mean i again i i could be here forever should we keep going yeah you should you got to stop me to get a larger range they added a fifth course to it and made it a bit bigger that brings us to all right the baroque guitar yeah we've already done a video on this guy we'll link that somewhere this is the gorgeous baroque guitar it was really popular between about 1600 to 1750 the baroque period now we've added a fifth course and the whole thing is two to fourth lower we have e b we just don't have a low e we still have doubled strings we still have the single chanterelle but we've kept the flat headstock we've gained a mustache bridge which i i love so much remember this beautiful rose is now a three-dimensional decoration which which is made of goat skin now that was very common at the time yeah all different designs you can see by different makers so it's like a branding thing i think that's the idea it's purely aesthetic by the way this doesn't do anything for the sound right that's interesting because like now like different brands differentiate themselves from the headstock and this was kind of like that of the time it's one of the distinguishing features we also have a flat back gut frets friction pegs all that's kind of the same i did something on purpose in this video i took out the pen yeah people were the tenth peg which is actually uh would have been a doubled version of the e but since most of the time they use it as a chanterelle without the doubled string it actually has nine strings and now there's no confusion it is very cool that 400 years ago if you were a guitar player you played a nine string yeah totally the big appeal for the baroque guitar was all the incredible sophisticated strum patterns that they developed but also could do plucking puntiado means plucking rasgueado means means strumming the puntiado sounds something like and the rescued much louder much deeper of a sound kind of foreshadowing of flamenco this instrument really blossomed in spain other people in europe called the music the way they were banging on guitars at the time the spanish were musical rodozo which is i think like ridiculous are like loud annoying music it's hilarious to to hear about that type of criticism of new music from 400 years ago that it's loud and annoying there are five pairs of strings except the top one single and the way you string the bottom two depends on which region you're in that these um could just be two high ds no like a like a guitar d and then the fifth string could also just have two high a's so that's a very high tuning with no bass register sometimes they added this low d that i have on here and for this video i decided since i didn't have it last time i added the low a and this is the a of the guitar so actually if i play the single strings a modern guitar we're just missing that low e [Music] now we're getting to the area where my muscle memory of a sixth string does me better than if i'm playing like a seven string or an eight string like this is almost this feels closer to what i learned growing up with a six string guitar the scale length of the instrument is very familiar yes exactly right yeah something pretty cool for more advanced guitar players out there i'm sure you've run into this action problems on the guitar can happen when the weather changes yeah that's a big because none of these have trust rods yet not exactly in modern guitars there's a truss rod through the neck that you can adjust and it adjusts the bow of the neck it gets warped this way or this way you can adjust that none of these have that yet so you had to be really careful with these yeah these got into some bad weather that's i mean that's it right there is an advantage with gut frets by the way say for example you have a buzzy note you can just make the next note after it make a smaller fret so there's more room so by changing the frets you can customize your setup every single fret can be a different size automatic guitar you have to literally file the frets down yep so it's actually a little bit more convenient yeah in some ways take one off and put a new one on it's certainly far more modular and big part why we're still using gut frets here is simply because these materials didn't exist at the time there's some instruments early instruments which started using types of metals for strings those wound strings that i was talking about fully wound strings didn't exist until into the i think the 18th century there was some maybe the late renaissance they took a piece of gut and you could wrap it with a small piece of metal like loosely wrapped i think it's called a crimped string just to give the string a bit more clarity actually using metal strings on the instrument that's that's pretty pretty far off gut strings sound great and and most early plucked players today even if you say hey i have some nylon strings that are cheaper and will last you longer i say i want those gut i want those guts well not because even because it's awesome that's a different sound it sounds better and of course they had metal at this time but i imagine putting metal into the fretboard would have been prohibitively expensive and maybe they just didn't even yeah they just didn't even want it if i had metal frets and i showed up to an early music gig it starts like this what temperament are we in yeah and i say i'm an equal they would go and i i can't adapt i can't change my notes now every single time someone plays one of those altered notes i'm out of tune you have to be able to move your frets otherwise you can't play the music it's not like they were waiting oh i can't wait till we can get rid of these gut frets man they they were great so if you want to learn more about this one particular instrument we got a whole video on it yes we've arrived now in the 17th century and even into the 18th so this instrument was being played a lot up until at least 1750. a new italian style called gallant music was emerging it was a return to simpler music in 1750 that's when bach died box music is incredibly complex it's very contrapuntal i mean there's a lot of separate voices weaving together it's very sophisticated in a reaction to that sophisticated music they started making this music which would return to more similar charming melodies very simple beautiful melody with some basic accompaniment and they wanted a better bass range what's the trend so far just keep adding strings and so at the end of the 18th century you start getting baroque guitars like this but with six courses six pairs of strings and then at the beginning of the 1800s we basically get a new instrument now i have a sixth single string guitar tuned e a d g b now we made it yeah so what year is this around 1800 we start seeing these six single string guitars but they're a little bit smaller than our current guitars right it kind of looks like a broke guitar but we do you're there e to e six strings single strings totally let's see what's different than the baroque guitar first of course now we have a low e the double stringing as i mentioned was often to give the sound a bit of a louder sound as well as in the bass to clarify those low bass notes which with gut is a little bit uh dull sounding so with an upper octave you can move around to different strings yes i think around 1750 this guy in naples uh savareze invented the wound string so he wounded metal around guts or sometimes silk and you get when you do that you get a really punchy loud bass sound they abandoned the double string because they didn't need it anymore yeah and then they abandoned all the doubles and now you get six single strings which is easier to tune and it's easier to do things like slurs and things on in general it's more convenient it's cheaper because you have less strings for the early 19th century it was the new the new trend yeah in 1750 we now have wound strings yes just a huge change to the sound yes since we have metal wound strings remember those gut frets that i told you no one was looking to replace them oh no the metal bond strings keep ruining by chewing up all the gut frets they experimented with many different materials wood and it ended up being metal that was i guess since the metal wound strings but there's a problem if they're metal you can't move them so now we have to decide okay how are we going to temper them and equal temperament was the decision because you can play in every key and everything will sound pretty good we have a smooth neck now on these instruments as you're playing through you're also rubbing against the frets and sometimes moving them is okay metal one strings though the top three by the way would still be gut in the 19th century it's another big thing remember how i was emphasizing on these other instruments they only had like eight or so friends yeah this thing has 22 frets it's a total shredder guitar [Laughter] and they're on the fretboard they're not on the body anymore exactly right the fretboard itself extends above the neck and actually that's floating i don't know if you can see that's not touching the soundboard oh just like a cello or yes you mentioned that these early guitars didn't have truss rods which is right yeah so you can't make adjustments on the fly guess what does this have a truss rod in it it's not a truss rod there's a mechanism here it comes with a clock key you can put the clock key and then turn this and it changes the angle oh that's one way around it yes so mid-concert if you're a little buzzy you can go right and then you have interesting a different action this wasn't on every single 19th century guitar this guitar specifically is a replica of a guitar from a very famous uh viennese maker named stauffer in places like fianna it was intense they called it guitar mania this just was the new the new thing if you're starting to learn with this you also need to learn about temperaments yes and tying on the frets and moving the frets to different temperaments this just bypasses all that so it takes some pressure off yeah we still do have pegs cause different gears yet yeah the gears come around 1820. i spoke earlier about this domino effect of well if you're going to have metal strings you need metal it turns out there's other things that happen too this is called a pin bridge with metal strings you get more tension and so you need a way of making sure this this bridge doesn't rip off they drilled holes in the top and the string actually goes through the hole and is held in place with these pins here yeah that is exactly like a modern acoustic guitar exactly and i didn't even think about that with these other ones but the bridges are so much different there's just a tie block yeah and that that wouldn't work with metal strings pull off the tension the tension's too great because it can handle more tension and you can have more taut strings that are metal wound you also get more volume and metal strings are more more durable let's hear how this thing sounds it's a little bit music at the time [Music] in the 19th century we have a big stylistic change happening now each century has you know their trends and their different tastes in music the favorite style of music in the 19th century in europe was opera and so the popular tunes were themes from operas right you could walk away humming oh yeah [Music] they would only hear these tunes if they paid the ticket to see it you can't go home and turn on spotify and listen to that your favorite song from the show you just saw if you wanted to hear that song again you had to go pay another ticket and go which is cost prohibitive the way around that to hear the song again is to have composers take out those moments fit them on instruments you can play at home you have more amateurs playing music because they wanted to hear it so you have more people playing at home in the streets and the bars and whatever in public forms but but you're right that the best level of music making only could be heard and there's just big platforms like like in an opera or going to see a symphony orchestra play because there's a big amateur market you have a lot of people specifically writing pieces for them that they can really manage you know really basic pieces that are [Music] it's not very hard but it's pretty simple melodies with arpeggiations and so that's what they were playing this was also the time of incredible virtuosos you wouldn't believe what they could do on the guitar one of my favorite examples of this is this piece by the spanish composer fernando sor he plucked a melody from a mozart opera from the magic flute there's a melody in it that goes and he fit it onto the guitar so you could play it at home but he goes above and beyond he then makes a whole set of variations on the theme when anybody just shows off what you can do on the guitar [Music] [Laughter] [Music] and at the very end he ends always in a very operatic way you can hear the operatic influence in the music but he doesn't only just try to imitate the opera he makes the guitar do what it does best using the idioms of the guitar i just wanted to make that point earlier that it's not just an amateur market although you have the birth of an amateur market for guitarists which never existed yeah you have way more people playing guitar than ever before yes if you were a musician at the time if you're a guitar player and you wanted to get your music out there you have your live performances of course so another avenue would be make music that's pretty easy to play on guitar but sounds great and then release the sheet music for it for other people to learn etudes studies here check it out see what yeah i mean at this point like me getting the guitar and learning how it works is there's no this is just a guitar yeah there's no learning how it works small differences i mentioned how will that change the way you play it yeah it does sound quite a bit different i'm playing something that i would normally play on a steel string and it's really not working on this one that's much softer more mellow sound i think well the fretboard is a little bit thinner than i'm used to it's thinner and shorter and also still no dots i put one piece of tape for you yeah one piece of paper on seventh fret when did we get dots the whole idea of a marker something hot and just burn the wood at spots to make a marker so anyone can do that i think probably not until the late 19th century early 20th century do you get standard dots on three five seven i don't see that on any classical guitars although on my classical tour i requested when i had it built for me a seventh fret dot when you're on stage and it's dark and you have to make a big shift you look down yeah you know whether you missed the note could be for that reason modern guitars too the dots are are glow in the dark like that's become exactly as well like it's super blatant i've been told for classical guitars that they don't have dots on them because players would use capos so often so you're always changing the key and then if you're playing with a capo in different places all the time then the dots would be confusing that's true rather than helping you oh i've seen you do it like this that's the classical vibrato yeah there you go that's great it works best do i've never really done that before but it works surprisingly well that's the beautiful one especially in the halfway point the string is is the most loose right yeah so it's easier to move around so we have a softer more mellow sound [Music] now all of a sudden we have 22 frets i almost added another octave yeah a lot of people say things like yeah but you probably never never use these oh they did they go all the way up to the top and it's such a beautiful extension of the register of the guitar these notes would have been brand new this is quite the development so if we go to the next level here from the 19th century in the mid-19th century we have some new developments in the guitar if you remember from our conversation with marshall and richard bernay they introduced us to a 275 dollar guitar guitar toys guitar torres was famous for taking this 19th century smaller guitar with ladder bracing he enlarged the body and the depth he came up with a new way of bracing the top the wood underneath with a system called fan bracing these new dimensions he added to the instrument codified the new style of guitar making for the rest of the classical guitars life all the way up until now so if we look at how small this guitar is around 1850 we have this new codified shape and now we're on a classical guitar this is our classical guitar every classical guitar you see if you meet someone says i play classical guitar their guitar is going to look more or less exactly like this and torres was responsible for codifying these dimensions we have a big body it's a bit deeper yeah right it produces more sound it's bassier uh we still have of course the metal frets and here now finally are our gears finally right gears we can fine tune on such a small scale i don't have to worry about pegs slipping or anything like that friction pegs of course it's just one to one if you turn it all the way through once it goes all the way through once and on here you can have one turn be a much smaller incremental change and i can do a lot more fine tuning let's having a gear of this size cost prohibitive to have on something like that it wasn't invented until really until i mean it became popular on 18 and 20 it started to be used but i'm not sure if it was even invented before this is a complex like clock mechanism yeah as far as i know this just simply didn't exist until the early 19th century as we learned with the torah's guitar these were handmades these were very expensive yes what we hear now is a bit more volume this guitar the same dimensions is also what flamencos use they usually have clear plates because they hit the top of the guitar so much that they don't want to damage the wood so all that really fun [Music] all that stuff works so well on this instrument too and you can i hope you can hear this is a louder sound this one has a dot on the side i custom ordered that dot it cost me 20 bucks now we're just at a classical guitar this is very familiar [Music] something like that nice so was flamenco the most popular music to be played on this in spain in spain the guitar became the national instrument of spain that type of music is you know essential to the spanish sound of music also what was it called at the time i don't imagine they started calling it classical guitar that's a good point um hey we got this new thing it's called the classical guitar all those terms the baroque guitar yeah the renaissance guitar these are hindsight yeah of course likely they called it the guitar yeah [Laughter] one of the most famous composers who played an instrument which was going to be this size was francisco targa this is a piece called ricardo stella alhambra which uses a technique called tremolo [Music] do [Music] they were coming up with all these amazing new techniques that they were using to full effect and the repertoire for this instrument is really varied played in so many different ways yes but not with a pick yet the classical guitar wasn't played with a pick because you can't achieve these parts with a pick we talked about nails earlier this is a big topic i do play with nails on each finger kind of little picks for the classical guitar in particular nails became very popular so not so much for this one it's somewhat dependent on the player at this time bro guitar some players played with nails renaissance guitar same idea for the renaissance loot no nails was the preference for ood of course they play with a pick eagle squirrel yeah eagles coil yeah that's about as cool as it gets coolness for your plectrum it's just gone down and down [Laughter] it's really important to mention when one instrument is invented the ones that came before it don't just get erased from history some people play them so there's overlap so when the baroque guitar became popular it's not that everyone said now we have a five course guitar we don't need a four course it was still being played played for a while and same thing with these two some people added a six strings some people kept their five string you play like a nine string guitar even though has become my standard oh okay oh yeah when the 19th century guitar and the classical guitar are becoming very popular the most popular way to write music for them became standard music notation like same as piano and violin do you remember what they used before that no tap oh before this they used to for that all of these are tab really yeah not the uh the ud is an oral tradition but 400 years of tablature wow and here i was thinking this whole time a tab is like this new thing that just made it easy to share guitar tabs on the internet i mean it just makes sense right it's super easy super logical tab existed for hundreds of years that's how i learned to play guitar it was guitar tabs on ultimateguitar.com and guitar pro yeah software so if you're out there shaming people for using tab shame on you shame on you let's take one more look at the chauffeur guitar this has a few things that the classical guitar doesn't have that i've associated with modern guitars like what the bridge yes that's the main thing the reason i wanted to talk about this one again for a second is because the maker of this one stouffer was super famous in vienna and he had an apprentice in the early 19th century named cf martin carl friedrich martin of martin guitars well he was a german guy who studied in vienna yeah to learn how to make these style guitars he moves with his family to new york in like 1833 and tries his luck here having studied with the best maker in vienna he took off and he started one of the biggest guitar industries that america ever ever seen by the early 1900s banjos and mandolins were becoming very popular big band era yeah big bandera banjos why are strong mandolins at the time why are strong they're loud it wasn't a positive thing that the guitar was this beautiful romantic instrument it was like dude we can't hear you yeah so they thought about putting metal strings on it just like the banjo all metal strings that's that's so much tension how is the top gonna handle that and one of the things that made martin special was around i think 1850 he invented this x bracing system how you brace the underside of the soundboard changes the sound a lot and so martin around 1850 comes up with this x-bracing pattern which is apparently more durable and is was kind of very the staple of martin guitars and stops this from flinging off yes it gave more support and changed the tone as well with all steel what he had to do was make it much more durable so he took his x bracing pattern made it even more durable which could handle the steel strings it worked by like 1920 steel string acoustic guitars became the guitar here we go it's an amazing guitar as we know it we did it we made it i'm just right at home it's just a string guitar [Music] hey 20th century the guitar that really swept america yes they wanted to compete to be loud enough but also steel strings are more durable they last longer they're also cheaper so cheaper more durable louder this many reasons why in america this this took off and we have the gears as well yep different type of gears than the mouse yeah from here martin guitars experiments a lot with body shape and size they have all these different models how wide is the bottom compared to the upper bouts they experimented with really big bodies like dreadnock guitars all the different models took off now we have a pickguard yeah do we have a guitar pick i usually have like 20. way louder louder yeah you could play this in a band and be heard such a different sound than everything i mean the steel strings of course and you can really feel it there's so much more tension that the strings around without martin's inventions and this pinhole bridge system the guitar couldn't sustain all that tension on the top 1833 right there on the headstock see yeah yeah [Music] lovely martin knew it was up that thing comes with a ton of dots yeah it comes a little bit yeah this has a ton of dots on it finally it took us this long to get the dots on the fretboard this has a truss rod in it too yes so the truss rod is in here and it wasn't until around 1940 that we get nylon strings so for classical guitarists started using nylon instead of gut why it's cheaper string technology also really influences how guitars are made and built and what players use clearly we've seen that from ancient instruments all the way back in mesopotamia all the way to a steel string it's certainly not a straight line it's also not an evolution towards a better and better instrument musical taste changes over time the instruments that we make and use serve the function of allowing us to play the music that we think sounds good whatever the musical trends are at the time that'll shape the instruments we play yeah so instruments don't get better and better they just change with our changing aesthetic there was many different ways i'm sure that all these were played just like this one is like you can't pick this up and say this is what the steel string acoustic sound is like to everybody there's so many different styles of music that this plays well said when you go back to the baroque period you're doing that for many many decades and you have to generalize a lot so without any recordings from the time period yeah yeah so when i when when someone says this is how world music sounds well we're going off of treatises and books people and they wrote down the things that were important to them but they didn't write down everything one of the reasons this instrument has been so successful over time is because it's so versatile blues folk rock pop classical so that's one of the reasons i think it's led to such an incredible popularity so far up until now all of these instruments have been amplified by just the body of the instrument the next step after this brings me to the type of guitars that are most close to my heart solid body electric guitars and just north in wisconsin is a les paul exhibit at a museum and we will look at the first ever electric solid body guitar ever made so that's the next video subscribe to that brandon thanks so much for everything we did we did it we made it through and we'll see you next week uh with the first ever electric solid body guitar cool see you then thanks for watching

Channel: Rob Scallon

Views: 1,609,155

Rating: 4.9528489 out of 5

Keywords: Rob Scallon, music, musician, guitar, guitarist, oud, lute, brandon acker, classical guitar, history of guitars, renaissance guitar, history of the guitar, history, evolution of the guitar, theorbo, theremin, carillon, pipe organ, acoustic, steel string, electric, electric guitar, amp, education, educational, song, play, instrument, instruments, strings, music lesson, acoustic guitar, play the guitar, lesson, gear, the guitar, guitars, rare guitars, old guitars, guitar music, guitar lesson, frets

Id: AjK4GVR1EcE

Length: 55min 12sec (3312 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/kerat]

Man this was so interesting. Thanks for posting it

[u/Eliastronaut]

Brandon and Rob are probably two of the most honest and genuine musicians on Youtube.

[u/ghorab_solaris]

Top-tier post

[u/Sindibadass]

Thanks for this OP, I just fell down a 4 hour rabbit hole.

[u/AwaitingDream]

@HereticofArabia