Hi I'm Jim Deeming. Instructor for JamPlay.com.
We are actually going to get down to playing this thing today.
I titled this lesson "Meet Your New Guitar."
We're going to go over some basics about what the parts are.
How it makes sound, how it makes music and then we'll start doing it.
Let's get started with a basic anatomy lesson.
We won't bore you to death with too much of this but things you need to know are basically what goes on in the major components.
This is the head of the guitar and it's pretty self explanatory as to why that would be called the head.
In the head is where the machinery exists that does the tuning of the guitar.
The strings are anchored to the tuning pegs up here and then you can adjust the pitch of a string right here.
If you increase the tension on a string the pitch goes up and if you decrease the tension the opposite happens.
This is fixed once you get it in tune and typically you are not changing things up here.
The six strings pass through this little white piece right here called the nut.
The nut does two important jobs.
One is it keeps a precise and even spacing between all six strings.
The other thing that it does is it keeps the strings a very precise distance up off of the neck of the guitar which we will talk about next.
This is your height and the spacing happens with the nut.
The nut is usually made with bone or a very hard plastic and one other thing to know about this on some guitars when your changing strings if you
take all six strings off at the same time sometimes these are not glued in or fastened to the guitar and they fall out.
Watch for that when you are changing strings.
This next section of the guitar is called the neck.
This is where your left hand spends most of it's time and this is basically the map of the notes that you can make with this guitar.
This is divided into individual vertical sections that you can see here and we call those frets.
What a fret actually is, is one of these individual wires that's inlaid into the fret board.
That's a fret but when we say play something in the first fret we usually mean that you are landing in the space just behind the first fret.
This would be the second fret, third and so on.
We will talk a little bit more about left hand technique in a minute.
The neck of the guitar is attached to predictably the body of the guitar and there are several things going on here.
First of all it's the other anchor point for the strings.
The strings come across the bridge which similar to the nut does the same two jobs.
The bridge preserves the height of the strings on this end and it also helps keep an even spacing between the strings so that they aren't sliding down.
Again this is a piece that may or may not be permanently fastened to your guitar with all of the strings taken off.
It is also a piece that on my guitar is made out of bone.
Often times it may be some other hard plastic or nylon material.
These are the pins that hold the strings into this next piece we are going to talk about which is the saddle.
The bridge sits in the saddle and the saddle is basically the conductor from the strings to this piece of wood here on the front of the guitar that we call
the sound board or the top.
You can probably imagine if you took a guitar string snapped one end into a vice and held onto the other end with a pair of pliers and stretched it
as tight as you could until you had a G string, play it, it's not going to make a lot of noise.
What really makes the noise, the sound with your guitar is the connection between the vibrating string and this part of the guitar
and most importantly the sound board.
This connects the vibration from the strings to this rather large, flat, single piece of wood, it vibrates
and then inside the box here the sound is allowed to escape out of the sound hole.
All of this stuff is working together to produce the sound that you hear but these are the major parts that you need to know.
Underneath this piece of wood there are different kinds of bracings.
Different manufacturers use different shapes to achieve different tones and different sounds.
The kind of wood that a guitar is made out of effects how it sounds and then also the quality of the manufacturer.
Slightly less important but not completely unimportant to the sound of the guitar is the side and the back.
Usually these are different wood than the face.
On my guitar this is spruce, not laminated but a solid spruce top and this back here is rosewood
and tends to be a darker and prettier wood on a lot of guitars it's neat stuff.
This is a very old guitar by the way. This belonged to my dad and this guitar was made in nineteen sixty nine, it's a Gibson Blue Ridge
and when my dad got it, it was setup for bluegrass strumming type of playing and it was pretty hard to play actually.
Especially for me as a young kid.
When I inherited this guitar a few years ago I took it in and got it setup and they did several things to make this play more like my style
which is finger style.
Also some of the things they did since we're talking about the string vibration needing to get connected to the bridge.
The way this guitar was originally designed was to have an adjustable bridge and the bridge actually sat up on bolts inside the saddle
which if you think about it is not a good connection between the bridge and the wood.
When I had the repair shop put that bridge down and seat it in the wood the difference and change in sound in this guitar was simply amazing.
It really is neat to see how the vibrating strings get their sound out of the wood of your guitar.
It's a fantastic instrument.