Knowing Your Guitar Lesson 1

As a budding guitarist it is important that you learn every facet of your new chosen hobby and the most important 1st step is almost always overlooked.
You must know the parts of your guitar you will need to be very familiar with the different names given to the parts of your guitar.

Although there are many different types of guitars (acoustic, classical and electric etc) they have many things in common.

Starting at the top of the guitar you can see the headstock; it connects to the neck. The tuners are located on the headstock and you will use those to alter the pitch of your strings on your guitar.

The nut is located where the headstock and the neck meet. The 'nut' is a small strip of bone or plastic with grooves to guide the strings into the tuners.

The neck of your guitar is where you will focus a lot of your time on, as you will have your fingers on various places on the neck in order to make different notes.

As we go down the guitar you can see the neck joins onto the body of the guitar. The body of the guitar can vary greatly, an acoustic and classical guitar have a hollow body and a sound hole, it's made that way to project the sound. Electric guitars are usually solid so they do not have a sound hole instead they have pickups where the sound hole is usually found.

The strings of the guitar come down from the tuners, over the nut, down the neck, over the body and over the sound hole down to the bridge where they are anchored.

Looking at the neck of your guitar you will see thin metal strips going across the entire surface, these are called frets
The first fret is the area between the nut and the first metal strip, the 2nd fret is the space between the first and second strip of metal and it continues down, you get the idea!