Parlor or parlour guitar usually refers to a type of acoustic guitar smaller than a Size No.0 Concert Guitar by C. F. Martin & Company. Mottola's Cyclopedic Dictionary of Lutherie Terms describes the term as referring to "any guitar that is narrower than current standards." [1]
The popularity of these guitars peaked from the late 19th century until the 1950s. Many blues and folk musicians have used smaller-bodied guitars, which were often more affordable, mass production models.
Parlor guitar has also come to denote a style of American guitar music from the 19th and early 20th centuries. [2] Noted composers include William Foden, Winslow Hayden, William Bateman, Justin Holland, and Wilhelm Bischoff. The music for the guitar includes a variety of dance forms (waltz, schottische, polka), instrumental arrangements of popular songs, guitar arrangements of then popular classical music, operatic arrangements and music from European guitar composers (Sor, Giuliani, Carcassi, Coste and Mertz). In the 1860, Henry Worrall composed two influential pieces for parlor guitar, "The Siege of Sebastopol" (sometimes spelled Sevastopol) and "Spanish Fandango." [3]
In the 2000s, the parlor guitar began enjoying a renaissance among players "who like their midrangery tone, historic vibe, and easy portability". [4] Modern luthiers are making parlor guitars in a wide variety of tonewoods. Takamine Guitars produces one made of cedar and koa, with a preamp powered by a 12AU7, the first acoustic guitar with a tube preamp. [4] Fylde Guitars produces the 'Single Malt Ariel' constructed from used whisky casks.
The steel-string acoustic guitar is a modern form of guitar that descends from the gut-strung Romantic guitar, but is strung with steel strings for a brighter, louder sound. Like the modern classical guitar, it is often referred to simply as an acoustic guitar, or sometimes as a folk guitar.
The classical guitar is a member of the guitar family used in classical music and other styles. An acoustic wooden string instrument with strings made of gut or nylon, it is a precursor of the modern steel-string acoustic and electric guitars, both of which use metal strings. Classical guitars derive from the Spanish vihuela and gittern of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Those instruments evolved into the seventeenth and eighteenth-century baroque guitar—and by the mid-nineteenth century, early forms of the modern classical guitar.
The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected strings against frets with the fingers of the opposite hand. A plectrum or individual finger picks may also be used to strike the strings. The sound of the guitar is projected either acoustically, by means of a resonant chamber on the instrument, or amplified by an electronic pickup and an amplifier.
A fret is any of the thin strips of material, usually metal wire, inserted laterally at specific positions along the neck or fretboard of a stringed instrument. Frets usually extend across the full width of the neck. On some historical instruments and non-European instruments, frets are made of pieces of string tied around the neck.
The acoustic bass guitar is a bass instrument with a hollow wooden body similar to, though usually larger than a steel-string acoustic guitar. Like the traditional electric bass guitar and the double bass, the acoustic bass guitar commonly has four strings, which are normally tuned E-A-D-G, an octave below the lowest four strings of the 6-string guitar, which is the same tuning pitch as an electric bass guitar.
An electric violin is a violin equipped with an electronic output of its sound. The term most properly refers to an instrument intentionally made to be electrified with built-in pickups, usually with a solid body. It can also refer to a violin fitted with an electric pickup of some type, although "amplified violin" or "electro-acoustic violin" are more accurate then.
A luthier is a craftsperson who builds or repairs string instruments that have a neck and a sound box. The word "luthier" is originally French and comes from the French word for lute. The term was originally used for makers of lutes, but it came to be used already in French for makers of most bowed and plucked stringed instruments such as members of the violin family and guitars. Luthiers, however, do not make harps or pianos; these require different skills and construction methods because their strings are secured to a frame.
The seven-string guitar adds one additional string to the more common six-string guitar, commonly used to extend the bass range or also to extend the treble range.
An archtop guitar is a hollow acoustic or semi-acoustic guitar with a full body and a distinctive arched top, whose sound is particularly popular with jazz, blues, and rockabilly players.
A pickup is a transducer that captures or senses mechanical vibrations produced by musical instruments, particularly stringed instruments such as the electric guitar, and converts these to an electrical signal that is amplified using an instrument amplifier to produce musical sounds through a loudspeaker in a speaker enclosure. The signal from a pickup can also be recorded directly.
A multi-scale fingerboard is an instrument fretboard which incorporates multiple scale lengths. The scale length is the vibrating length of the strings.
Takamine Co., Ltd. is a Japanese guitar manufacturer based in Nakatsugawa, Gifu, Japan. Takamine is known for its steel-string acoustic guitars.
The scale length of a string instrument is the maximum vibrating length of the strings that produce sound, and determines the range of tones that string can produce at a given tension. It is also called string length. On instruments in which strings are not "stopped" or divided in length, it is the actual length of string between the nut and the bridge.
The neck is the part of certain string instruments that projects from the main body and is the base of the fingerboard, where the fingers are placed to stop the strings at different pitches. Guitars, banjos, ukuleles, lutes, the violin family, and the mandolin family are examples of instruments which have necks. Necks are also an integral part of certain woodwind instruments, like for instance the saxophone.
A person who is specialized in the making of stringed instruments such as guitars, lutes and violins is called a luthier.
The early romantic guitar, the guitar of the Classical and Romantic period, shows remarkable consistency from 1790 to 1830. Guitars had six or more single courses of strings while the Baroque guitar usually had five double courses. The romantic guitar eventually led to Antonio de Torres Jurado's fan-braced Spanish guitars, the immediate precursors of the modern classical guitar.
An acoustic guitar is a musical instrument in the string family. When a string is plucked, its vibration is transmitted from the bridge, resonating throughout the top of the guitar. It is also transmitted to the side and back of the instrument, resonating through the air in the body, and producing sound from the sound hole. The original, general term for this stringed instrument is guitar, and the retronym 'acoustic guitar' distinguishes it from an electric guitar, which relies on electronic amplification. Typically, a guitar's body is a sound box, of which the top side serves as a sound board that enhances the vibration sounds of the strings. In standard tuning the guitar's six strings are tuned (low to high) E2 A2 D3 G3 B3 E4.
A bridge is a device that supports the strings on a stringed musical instrument and transmits the vibration of those strings to another structural component of the instrument—typically a soundboard, such as the top of a guitar or violin—which transfers the sound to the surrounding air. Depending on the instrument, the bridge may be made of carved wood, metal or other materials. The bridge supports the strings and holds them over the body of the instrument under tension.
Guitar bracing refers to the system of wooden struts which internally support and reinforce the soundboard and back of acoustic guitars.
Gary Southwell is a British musician-guitarist and luthier, specializing in guitars of Modern Classical and Romantic eras, resident in Northumberland.
... Claire's Guitar [released circa 2005] is the fanciest Size 5 [guitar which] C. F. Martin has produced in more than 80 years, ...
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