The classical guitar, also called Spanish 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 15th and 16th century. Those instruments evolved into the 17th and 18th-century baroque guitar—and by the mid-19th century, early forms of the modern classical guitar. Today's modern classical guitar was established by the late designs of the 19th-century Spanish luthier, Antonio Torres Jurado.
For a right-handed player, the traditional classical guitar has 12 frets clear of the body and is properly held up by the left leg, so that the hand that plucks or strums the strings does so near the back of the sound hole (this is called the classical position). However, the right-hand may move closer to the fretboard to achieve different tonal qualities. The player typically holds the left leg higher by the use of a foot rest. The modern steel string guitar, on the other hand, usually has 14 frets clear of the body (see Dreadnought) and is commonly held with a strap around the neck and shoulder.
The phrase "classical guitar" may refer to either of two concepts other than the instrument itself: The instrumental finger technique common to classical guitar—individual strings plucked with the fingernails or, less frequently, fingertips The instrument's classical music repertoire
The term modern classical guitar sometimes distinguishes the classical guitar from older forms of guitar, which are in their broadest sense also called classical, or more specifically, early guitars. Examples of early guitars include the six-string early romantic guitar ( – 1880), and the earlier baroque guitars with five courses.
The materials and the methods of classical guitar construction may vary, but the typical shape is either modern classical guitar or that historic classical guitar similar to the early romantic guitars of France and Italy. Classical guitar strings once made of gut are now made of materials such as nylon or fluoropolymers, typically with silver-plated copper fine wire wound about the acoustically lower (d-A-E in standard tuning) strings.
A guitar family tree may be identified. The flamenco guitar derives from the modern classical, but has differences in material, construction and sound.
Contexts
The classical guitar has a long history and one is able to distinguish various: instruments repertoire (composers and their compositions, arrangements, improvisations)
Both instrument and repertoire can be viewed from a combination of various perspectives:
Historical (chronological period of time) Baroque guitar – 1600 to 1750 Early romantic guitars – 1750 to 1850 (for music from the Classical and Romantic periods) Modern classical guitars Geographical Spanish guitars (Torres) and French guitars (René Lacôte, ...), French guitars (René Lacôte, ...), German guitars (Herrmann Hauser), etc. Cultural Baroque court music, nineteenth-century opera and its influences, nineteenth-century folk songs, Latin American music
Historical perspective
Early guitars
While "classical guitar" is today mainly associated with the modern classical guitar design, there is an increasing interest in early guitars; and understanding the link between historical repertoire and the particular period guitar that was originally used to perform this repertoire. The musicologist and author Graham Wade writes:
Nowadays it is customary to play this repertoire on reproductions of instruments authentically modelled on concepts of musicological research with appropriate adjustments to techniques and overall interpretation. Thus over recent decades we have become accustomed to specialist artists with expertise in the art of vihuela (a 16th-century type of guitar popular in Spain), lute, Baroque guitar, 19th-century guitar, etc.
Different types of guitars have different sound aesthetics, e.g. different colour-spectrum characteristics (the way the sound energy is spread in the fundamental frequency and the overtones), different response, etc. These differences are due to differences in construction; for example, modern classical guitars usually use a different bracing (fan-bracing) from that used in earlier guitars (they had ladder-bracing); and a different voicing was used by the luthier.