I have deep philosophical thoughts regarding the game theory of teaching beginning guitar. Particularly in the ways that a 'method', (which is what this is, it's a digital method), is unique from a strict in-real-life (IRL) approach. It is almost always a mistake to share that with a beginning student, but if a more advanced player or teacher is interested, I explore my thoughts in an essay entitled, "A Comprehensive Method to Guitar Lucidity." I will link at the bottom. For everyone else, only two things important to note:
We Go Comprehensively
We Go Lucidly
In order to get rocking as quick as can be, four concepts must be covered right at the start:
Four Essential Heuristic Concepts:
• I Parts of the Guitar (Head, Neck Body, Etc...)
So you can talk about the guitar.
• II Rudiments of Music (Parts of Staff, Note Values, Note Names, Etc...)
So you can talk and think about music, both internally & externally.
• III Language Arts of the Guitar (Chord Charts, Tab, Etc... )
So you can apply musical ideas to the guitar.
• IV Embouchure: How to Hold, Fret, & Play the Guitar
So you can execute, and rock out!
I Parts of the Guitar
Learning the parts of the guitar are essential, and with IRL lessons they are a week-one accomplishment, but with a method give yourself a month. In the same way we'll be learning guitar technique, we want to engender lucidity, by learning these parts comprehensively. If we know what the parts do, it will be easier to remember what they're called, and how to use them.
3 primary sections
The parts of the guitar are dispersed across 3 primary sections. Kind of like an animal, we have the Headstock, the Neck and the Body.
The Headstock
(or more casually, 'The Head')
Headstock
Now let's take a look at the parts found on the headstock, often just called the head. Firstly we have the Top Nut, commonly just referred to as the nut as there is no longer a "bottom nut" that needs distinction. The nut is sometimes technically on the headstock, and sometimes technically on the neck, and in both cases, is considered the division between the two regions. It holds, and divides the strings into the section that is meant to be fretted, and meant to be vibrating, and the dead side that is guided into the tuners. Tuners are a catch all term that is short for tuning pins, or tuning pegs, or even machine heads, which is a technical reference to the geared aspect of a modern tuner. Tuning pins are usually found in classical guitars or violins, and though they resemble tuning machines, they’re slightly different technologically. There are advantages and disadvantages to both pins & pegs. For instance, slotted heads with tuning pins give the strings a greater break angle across the top nut. This effectively ‘traps’ the vibration of what’s known as the scale-length of string: the length of string between the saddle and the nut that is supposed to be fretted, plucked, and vibrated. If vibrations slip out of the scale length, and into what should be a dead zone, you have less sustain, and often a really ugly buzzing. A greater break angle is extra useful on instruments with lesser string tension. My favorite acoustic guitar currently has 13-56 gauge strings, which is almost 200 pounds of string tension. A classical guitar with nylon strings may have less than half that tension. As strings get thinner, like on electric guitars, the cumulative tension decreases, so sometimes steel string guitars need extra help with this, and use a small piece of hardware called a string tree. This is especially true with electric guitars that don't have an angled headstock at all. A lot of people forget that when Leo Fender first released the Telecaster, with it's straight, straight headstock, electric guitar strings were gauge 13! This is now considered a wildly difficult gauge to play, usually reserved for acoustic guitars. As modern players have evolved to prefer thinner and thinner string gauge, with less and less tension, electric guitars with an un-angled/straight headstock-to-neck angle have had to begin using string trees on their headstocks. I will say, electric guitars that have angled headstocks may have an advantage in string break-angle, but those guitars do not rest flat on the table top or floor. Also, that neck angle is a VERY WEAK spot. There is almost no guitar experience more tragic than watching a wildly expensive guitar slide off of a lean and suffer decapitation. It happens in slo-mo, with everybody watching, and you can't blame anyone but yourself. It's the worst. I saw a 'cool-kid' do it to his father's priceless vintage Gibson Les Paul that he brought in to our high school. Yeah, that was the last time anybody saw him.
Some tuners are 3x3, some 6 in-line and really there are no rules. Iconoclastically Ernie Ball uses 4x2, which is my favorite, and sometimes you’ll have 7 or 8 string guitars with even stranger arrangements. Sometimes there's a hole, or an aperture at the bass of the front of the headstock, this is your truss rod aperture. Often a truss-cover needs to be unscrewed to access the aperture: you will usually need a tool, a hex key or an Allen-wrench to tighten and loosen the rod. The truss, or 'the rod', runs the length of the neck. As adjusted it changes the relief of your neck, which is whether your neck is bowed, known as concave, or back-bowed, known as convex. This adjustment also effects your action: or the distance your strings are from your fretboard. It is a more straight forward practice, if you loved your guitar neck’s relief and you wanted to preserve it, you might raise or lower you top nut, and your saddle to adjust your action. The reason you might want to do that is because there is a slight radius to most fretboards, which means that you can get such a low an action, that when you bend to far, the vibration of your strings mute out. This is known as a fret-out. Particularly for electric players, this is an awful disruption to the flow state. If you want to bend up a perfect whole step, and right when you get there- it just ‘mutes’, it’s like speaking and going on and on, but leaving off the very last and most important… ...word.
The Neck
Neck
The headstock yields to the neck via the top nut. Which is an anglicization of an old, possibly archaic Germanic word 'noot', which meant groove or slot. The strings pass over the nut quite visibly in these slots. Some nuts are made of bone, or perhaps plastic, but fancy things such as ball bearings are not uncommon either. My favorite exotic material for nuts (and saddles) is petrified mastodon tusk. The nut’s modern opposite is the saddle, and it is rare to see groove or slots here- the string rides on top of it, like you might ride a horse, using a saddle. On the back of some guitars opposite the nut, where the headstock angle breaks, you may have bit of wood called a volute, and though it may be done up rather artistically, it has evolved to usually be a diamond shape of wood. This is a bit of structural carpentry, and an extra bit of reinforcement at this very weak spot. It comes from the latin meaning 'scroll like', or 'spiral'. The spirals at the top of Corinthian Columns are known as volutes, and the spiral of a violin is a volute. If you examine the spiral or the volute on a violin you would see that it terminates with an extra bit of material , and when they were added to guitars, from what I understand they began as a something that resembled this- as the years moved forward, they began to take a more utilitarian design, hence the modern, guitar centric diamond design. A classic example of technical & etymologic evolution.
The neck is sometimes made of one piece of wood, but very often is made of two principal parts, the structural neck, and then the fretboard, or fingerboard, the two terms being largely interchangeable (some instruments do have fingerboards but do not have frets, so I think of the term fingerboard as more universal, & fretboard more specific). There are a lot of different construction alternatives to accommodate inserting the aforementioned truss rod, and usually it doesn’t take a lot of work to see how your truss was installed. Most guitars have a two piece neck and fingerboard, and usually just instal the truss in-between the two before joining. But others, like the pictured Stratocaster, has a single piece of wood with a center route to accommodate the truss. The rosewood skunk stripe showing where the truss channel was routed. My Ernie Ball Music Man Axis had its truss installed by taking one solid piece of birds eye maple, finely chopping a fretboard slice off, installing the truss rod, and then rejoining the matched wood. The guitar also doesn't have truss aperture on the head stock, but rather at the neck base. I’m rather partial to this because it makes adjusting very easy, although, adjusting from the headstock is fairly easy too (you should definitely make sure someone else shows you how to adjust your truss the first couple or dozen times. I’ve seen quite a few broken necks because of over tightening the truss).
Of course the primary feature of the neck is the frets. Some instruments, such as non-tempered guitars, or some sitars have movable frets, but the standard guitar have the frets disbursed in a graduated way with the larger spaced ones closer to the headstock, and the smaller ones running towards the body. Each fret is the pitch distance of a half step, exactly the same as one key to the next on a piano. However, unlike a piano, where the sharp & flat keys are shorter and typically black, on a guitar, the sharp and natural notes all look the same. Fret wire, as uninstalled frets are typically called, can come in a lot of different dimensions and a lot of different metals. Some people swear by stainless steel frets, and others prefer a softer material. I do like a softer, thin & high fret, although, they tend to wear out rather quickly. Sometimes fret wire is snipped and installed, but the fret ends are not ‘dressed’, and they can be jagged and sharp like a cheese grater. Cheap, unplayable guitars almost always have sharp frets. Gibson used a binding with raised ‘fret fenders’ (my word) to address this. Leo Fender paid a human to sit at a bench and file them down, and this seems to be the superior technique now. Although I am partial to the aesthetic of binding, I dislike the Gibson ‘fret-fender’ approach. I typically get my strings stuck in-between frets and fret fenders when I bend. I'm admittedly, a silly aggressive bender. Every Gibson I’ve owned, i've had the binding snipped/sanded, and I’ve replaced the shorter frets with full length ones overhanging the now clean edged binding. Ironically, despite making it a better playing instrument, my process can lower the instrument's value. As far as neck binding goes- often it’s just a visual plastic, or good ‘contrapuntal wood’ (from a design sense), I’m partial to Koa as a binding.
The inlay on a guitar is usually utilitarian, front facing dots are not for the player to look at, but rather the audience, students, teachers or fans. Many guitars don’t have front dots at all, which isn't bad because you can always use decals to make your own. The side dots ARE for visual aide, and you’ll see all sorts of materials used, from clay to seashells. Sometimes you’ll see some spectacular inlay just for the fun of it, like dragons, birds or beautiful geometric design. I’m a huge fan, but it’s the sort of thing that very quickly costs more than the entire rest of the instrument combined. Where the neck terminates you’ll find all sorts of different designs, such as extended fretboards, to cool modern innovations, like Mcpherson’s cantilevered neck. I’m a huge fan of this, and all you have to do is sit with one of these guitars to experience the sustain. Many Fenders have a slight fretboard overhang in the fingerboard where the structural neck attaches to the body. This is because their first guitars only had 21 frets, and as modern taste grew to 22, they simply extended the fingerboard wood over the body, a nice clean solution which borrows from the traditional acoustic/classical guitar design. Some guitars may have less frets, or even more. 24 always made a lot of sense to me, because it is 2 full octaves, but the vast majority have 22, 21 or less. Where the neck mates with the body, you’ll often see either a bolt-on plate, or neck-plate, as most electrics feature, or some sort of carpentry solution as most acoustics feature. There are no rules of course, Gibson guitars often use a carpentry solution: the mortise & tenon joint, and Gibson players swear this is a part of the tone. I do agree, although I also think the type of glue matters (I LOVE hide glue for acoustically active joins, and other glues for acoustically dead joins). Some electrics actually use on entire piece of wood for the neck and the body, and some use what’s known as a though-body neck. There are advantages and disadvantages to all. I do prefer a contoured neck-heel: it’s very comfortable in the upper register, once you've tried it, there's no going back to the old, non-contoured neck plate. On acoustics, I’m a huge fan of a dovetail joint: they’re expensive to make and mate, and they’re expensive to have serviced, but it’s a very solid joint that allows for a wonderful transfer of vibration. McPherson is on the cutting edge of neck body joints with their cantilevered-neck feature, and so is Kenny Hill, with their elevated fingerboard design.
The Body
This brings us to the body, and this is where the majority of differences between an acoustic and an electric really make manifest. Let’s jump straight to the heart. On an acoustic guitar, The strings vibrate, and the vibration is shuttled through the saddle, the bridge, the bridge plate, to the top, specifically the area referred to as the soundboard. Even piano’s have soundboards, and this large vibrating surface excites the air within the acoustic chamber, and it comes out of the much smaller sound hole, thus producing amplification. Large board, small hole, mechanical advantage. An electric guitar, uses an electronic pickup, of which there are several types, and as the strings vibrate the pickups 'pickup' the sound and send the signal to an output. Everyone thinks that a guitar has an input because you would input a cable like so, but the name input vs output is in reference to a very important thing called ‘signal flow.’ The guitar’s input is your fingers- the output, the place where the sound comes out of- is the output- which then tracks to an amplifier input, which looks the same, but is now receiving, and then that outputs via a speaker. Some guitar's have top-mounted outputs, others side-mounted outputs. I deeply prefer top-mounted, but don’t really care.
Many acoustic guitars also have pickups. And sometimes, electric guitars also have sound holes- I have one guitar that has an “f-hole” like in a violin, in the shape of an M, I love it! Sound holes often have rosettes, and they’re just fun visual bits of artistry. Acoustic guitars typically use string pins, or bridge pins, to anchor their strings, but classical guitars commonly just tie the string in. Where an acoustic guitar typically has one saddle, an electric might have one for each string, but you will see all sorts of different approaches, and there are no rules. One of the things that I love on electric guitars is the suspended bridge, also known as a whammy bar or a vibrato. Leo Fender famously referred to it as a suspended tremolo, triggered by the tremolo arm, and although this is still common parlance, it is technically not a tremolo. This was a mistake that sadly took off, a tremolo is a modulation of volume, vibrato is modulation of pitch. There are a lot of different ways to do this, and even some solutions that work for acoustic guitars, like the bigsby vibrato.
As far as the controls of an electric guitar’s pickups, typically there is volume, and some sort of tone option. If there are multiple pickups, there is usually a pickup selector switch, which lets you switch and combine between the neck pickup, the middle pickup, and the bridge pickup. Sometimes there is volume and tone for each pickup, sometimes one volume, but individual tones, and sometimes there are extra things which stump even the most avid players, like coil taps, or preamp boosts, or who knows! Most magnetic pickups don’t require a battery, we call them passive pickups, but some do and we call them active. Some pickups use piezo crystals, which also require a battery. Some guitars have regular old passive pickups but have an active element, like an onboard eq system that requires a battery. There are no rules, it really depends on the guitar. My Ernie Ball Music Man has three types of pickups, magnetic, piezo, and a midi pickup for communicating with a computer. It also has two outputs! The only thing that’s really left are the strap buttons, used to connect your guitar to a strap. Some guitars also use pins here, strap pins, but most modern guitars make use of buttons. Some super fancy guitars don’t even have anything installed because it ruins the purity of the acoustic instrument, but I think that’s dumb. An old-fashioned way of using a strap had a strap pin on the lower bought of the guitar, and then the player would tie the other side to the headstock. I hate this, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s not super nice to your neck. I prefer a neck heel strap button. A lot of acoustic guitars have an output that doubles as a strap button- but I hate these, they never work well. I often use a device that separates the functionality.
Body Surfaces
The body's top is to a large degree what produces the tone of the guitar. This is the wood, usually book-matched, that the sound hole is cut into, and the wood that the bridge rests upon. It is an acoustically-active tone-wood, and it is almost always made of spruce or cedar. There are also the sides, and the back, which also contribute to the tone as well, but in a lesser degree- I’ve had a lot of guitars with cracks in the backs and sides, and I have to say, they really don’t offend me as much as top cracks seem to. Top cracks really bug me aesthetically, but sometimes they don't seem to matter, and yet sometimes they're existentially awful for tone. On one hand, I have a wonderful teaching/playing guitar, a solid wood Taylor that now has 14 cracks in it, and it sounds amazing! It seems as if each new crack makes it sound better- a truly bizarre guitar that I love and will never let go of. On the other hand, I had a Martin D-35 that was sadly and tragically top-cracked by an airline on a fly-gig. Afterwards, it suffered some of the strangest phase cancellation I've ever even read about. The wave file looked like a trombonist's wave file (all asymmetrical). Crazy gig, never trust an heirloom instrument to an airline (but I digress).
There is the lower bout, the wider end of the guitar. I’ve heard it referred to as the guitars 'bum', and then there's the upper bout, often colloquially referred to as the guitar's shoulders. Sometimes, during manufacture, one of the upper bought's shoulders is subtracted or 'cutaway' in order to create a cutaway. This allows the player to access the higher frets. Generally they are frowned upon by purists, but I like them (although I should mention my favorite acoustic guitar does NOT have a cutaway). There are two main types: pointy Florentine cutaways, and rounded Venetian cutaways.
Wrap Up
These are the primary parts of the guitar, but the list is by no mean comprehensive. There are countless accessories and customizations that the player and the luthier can augment their guitar with. New developments are made every year, by professionals using computer aided design, as well as amateurs just using their imaginations in their garages and bedrooms. If you could change one thing about your guitar, what would it be? What is your favorite thing about your instrument?
Extra Reading & Resources:
https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/parts-of-a-guitar/
https://www.ducksters.com/musicforkids/guitar_parts.php
https://www.soundpure.com/a/expert-advice/guitars/parts-of-an-acoustic-guitar/
https://guitarskillsplanet.com/parts-of-the-guitar/#